How we rank Rochester stoneworks companies

A bad masonry job doesn't announce itself at the walkthrough. A retaining wall built without drainage looks identical to one built correctly for the first two or three winters — the difference only shows up when hydrostatic pressure from 50-plus freeze-thaw cycles finally bulges or cracks the face. A repointing job with the wrong mortar type on a pre-1930s brick house looks fine for a season and then spalls the brick itself. Star ratings are a lagging indicator in this trade, sometimes by years, which is exactly why we built a transparent, mechanical formula instead of asking you to trust a five-star average at face value. Every business in our directory gets a single composite score derived from the formula below. We publish it, and our data sources, so you can verify the rankings yourself.

The Roc Score formula

score = w1·googleRating + w2·googleCount + w3·yelpRating
      + w4·yelpCount + w5·bbbAccredited + w6·recency
      + w7·serviceAreaOverlap

Where (each factor normalized 0-1, weights sum to 1.0):
  w1 = 0.30  Google rating (stars ÷ 5)
  w2 = 0.20  Google review count (log-scaled — diminishing
             returns past ~500 reviews, so volume alone
             can't run away with the score)
  w3 = 0.10  Yelp rating (stars ÷ 5)
  w4 = 0.10  Yelp review count (log-scaled, same curve as w2)
  w5 = 0.05  BBB accreditation (1 if accredited, else 0)
  w6 = 0.10  Review recency (1.0 if ≤30 days old, 0.7 if
             ≤90 days, 0.3 if ≤365 days, 0 if older/unknown)
  w7 = 0.15  Overlap with our 10 target Rochester-area
             stoneworks suburbs (Pittsford, Brighton, Penfield,
             Webster, Fairport, Mendon, Greece, Henrietta,
             Irondequoit, Victor)

Final score = round(rawScore × 100), clamped to 0-100.

Rating alone doesn't decide the ranking — Google and Yelp rating combined are capped at 40% of the formula, deliberately below half, because a wall or patio that looks beautiful at handoff and a wall or patio that's still standing in year twenty are not reliably the same thing, and we don't want a handful of enthusiastic five-star reviews from a company's first three jobs outweighing everything else. Review count is log-scaled rather than linear because masonry crews are mostly 2-5 person owner-operator outfits, not high-volume service businesses — a mason who has been doing quality retaining wall work in Rochester for a decade might legitimately have 30 reviews instead of 300, and a strictly linear count would punish that unfairly relative to a company that runs more aggressive review-solicitation campaigns.

Recency carries a real caveat specific to this trade: masonry in Rochester is a seasonal business, built April through November because mortar needs daytime temperatures above 40°F to cure. A mason with a thin run of reviews in January doesn't mean their crew is struggling — it means nobody pours a footing in a Rochester winter. We weight recency at 10%, not higher, partly for this reason; a company shouldn't be penalized in the formula for the industry's own build calendar. Service-area overlap gets 15% because stone sourcing and site logistics are genuinely regional here — a five-star mason working out of Canandaigua who has never quoted a Pittsford job isn't useful to someone searching this directory, no matter how good their reviews are somewhere else.

Worked example

The first two rows are the important comparison: a near-perfect 5.0★ average from a brand new crew scores meaningfully lower than an established mason at 4.8★, because five reviews is not yet a track record and the log-scaled review-count factor reflects that honestly. The third row shows why service-area overlap matters as much as it does — a highly rated chimney specialist working entirely outside our ten target Rochester suburbs scores lowest of the three, even with strong ratings on both platforms, because they aren't realistically the company you'd call for a Pittsford or Penfield job.

Data sources

• Google Business Profile — primary source for review count + average stars + service area
• Yelp — secondary review signal where present
• BBB.org — accreditation status + complaint history (public records only)
• NY State business registry — verifies legal entity name + active status
• Business's own website — for service offerings + pricing where published

One caveat specific to masonry: a meaningful share of the businesses in this directory are second- or third-generation owner-operator crews who built their business on referrals, not digital marketing, which means some strong, established masons carry a thinner online review footprint than a company their age and reputation would suggest. We don't treat "no BBB record" or a modest review count as a red flag by itself — it's a 5% and 20% weight respectively, not a gate — but it's worth knowing why a highly regarded local mason might still show a modest score on this site relative to their real-world reputation. We update business data weekly. If you see something stale, email connormeador@gmail.com.

What we DON'T do

• Pay-for-placement — no masonry contractor pays to rank higher, and paying for a directory subscription elsewhere doesn't move the Roc Score
• Reciprocal-link schemes — no "link to us, we'll link to you"
• Scraped review text — we link to original Google/Yelp sources, we don't republish full reviews
• Fabricated certifications — we don't invent NCMA installer credentials or historic-restoration accreditations a business hasn't actually earned
• AI-generated business images tied to specific companies — no synthetic "before/after" wall or patio photos presented as real jobs