Vota scores restaurants on a scale from 1 to 100. The scale is global. A score of 100 means a restaurant sits among the top 1 percent in the world. A score of 1 means the bottom 1 percent. There is no separate ranking by city, country, or cuisine. Every restaurant on Vota is measured on the same scale.

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How does Vota rate restaurants?

Vota does not ask users to score a restaurant or give it stars. It asks which of two restaurants is better. From a series of these binary choices, the system works out where a restaurant belongs in that user’s ranking: better than the one below it, not as good as the one above it. The position between those two restaurants becomes the user’s rating.

Comparison is used because it is easier and more accurate than a star scale. Most people find it hard to assign a fair, absolute number to a meal. Almost anyone can say which of two restaurants they preferred. The method is also harder to manipulate.

When users compare, they are asked to judge on quality and experience only, and to leave price out. Value for money is not part of the decision.

How do you rate your first restaurants?

A new user cannot be compared against anything until they have rated something, so onboarding requires ranking five restaurants the user has already visited. From there, the comparison system takes over.

Placing a single restaurant usually takes around five comparisons. Early on, when a user has little history, it can take one or two. The number settles around five as the user rates more.

What if two restaurants are too close, or you can’t compare them?

If two restaurants are too close to call, the user can say so, and both are given the same rating.

If a user cannot reasonably compare the two restaurants in front of them, they can skip. Skipping produces no rating for that pair.

Which restaurants does Vota ask you to compare?

The system tries to compare like with like. Sushi is compared against sushi where possible. Once a user has rated a few places, the algorithm looks for similar restaurants in the right range to compare against. When it cannot find a close match, it widens out to a related category, for example seafood against sushi, staying as near in cuisine as it can.

This is hardest at the start, when there are few ratings to draw on, and a user will sometimes see an odd pairing. Skip exists for those cases. Pairing improves as more ratings accumulate.

How can you compare McDonald’s to a Michelin restaurant?

By judging quality and experience, and nothing else. Take price and occasion out of it, and the two become comparable. On quality and experience alone, a Michelin restaurant will almost always come out ahead of McDonald’s. Most of the time Vota pairs similar restaurants anyway, so a user is more often choosing between two burger places than between a burger and a tasting menu. Either way, both land on the same 1 to 100 scale. McDonald’s might be a 30 and the Michelin restaurant a 98, and both scores are honest.

Can you change a rating?

A user can re-rate a restaurant at any time. Running it through more comparisons moves it to a position that better reflects what the user thinks of it.

How do individual ratings become a Vota score?

Each user’s comparisons produce that user’s own ratings. Across all users, those ratings are averaged. The average is not the published score.

Vota’s published score is fully linear. The averages are distributed across the full 1 to 100 scale so that each score holds an equal number of restaurants. There are as many restaurants at 1 as at 4, at 10, at 50, and at 100. A score therefore reflects where a restaurant stands against every other restaurant, rather than sitting in a cluster of inflated averages.

Do scores change over time?

Global scores move up and down as new users rate. They update continuously. A restaurant that is consistent, and that users rate consistently, tends to hold its score, particularly once it has more than a few ratings behind it. The scores that move most are the newest ones.

What do the red and pink scores mean?

The score shown in red is the restaurant’s global rating. Everyone sees the same red number. It is not personalized.

A score shown in pink is the user’s own rating, visible only to that user. A restaurant might show 100 in red, the global score, with 99 in pink beside it, the score from that user’s own comparisons.

What happens with a restaurant that has no ratings?

A restaurant with no ratings shows no score. A score appears as soon as one user has rated it.

The earliest ratings are handled carefully. When a restaurant has only a few ratings, the system moderates the result so that one or two users cannot push it to an extreme. The exact mechanics are not published, because disclosing them would make the system easier to manipulate. The purpose is a representative score and resistance to manipulation by a small number of users.

Where do the ratings come from?

Every Vota score is built from Vota users. The system does not aggregate or blend ratings from Google, TripAdvisor, Yelp, or any other source. A restaurant’s score reflects the Vota community and nothing else.

New to Vota? Start with the complete guide to independent restaurant ratings: What is Vota?