Rankings › Blog › What is never in a BestBounceBiz score, and why we leave it out
What is never in a BestBounceBiz score, and why we leave it out
By BestBounceBiz Editorial · · methodology, scoring, fairness, how the rankings work
A rental operator with three bounce houses and a borrowed trailer looks up their state and finds their website sitting above a company that runs a warehouse full of inflatables. The first reaction is usually some version of "that can't be right." The bigger company has more units, more years in business and more Google reviews. How did the small one end up ahead?
The answer is that BestBounceBiz doesn't rank businesses. It ranks websites. And a handful of things that feel like they should matter are deliberately kept out of the score. This post walks through what those things are, why each one is left out, and what you can do with that if you run a rental site.
The short list
Here's what is never an input to a BestBounceBiz score, as stated on our methodology page:
- Fleet size. How many inflatable units a company owns or lists.
- Prices charged. Whether a business is cheap, expensive or somewhere in between.
- Google ratings. Star ratings and review counts from Google.
- Years in business. How long a company has been operating.
- Billing. Whether a company pays for a plan, claims its listing, or neither.
None of these are read by the scorer. Each of the 6,206 websites in the current rankings, across 51 states, was scored on the same public pages with the same rules (Website Scorer v2.2.0 (248 questions), scoring window 2026-10-14 to 2026-11-03, scores as of 2026-11-03).
Why fleet size is left out
A big fleet is a real business strength. It means more choice on a busy Saturday and a better chance of getting the unit you want. But it says very little about whether the website helps a renter find that unit, understand what it costs and book it.
We've seen small operators with clear, quick, honest websites and large ones whose sites bury their inventory behind slow pages and vague contact forms. If fleet size counted, the second group would win by default, and the ranking would stop telling you anything about websites.
Where a company page shows a unit count, it's there for information only. It never feeds the score.
Why prices are left out
We don't reward low prices and we don't reward high ones. Pricing depends on local costs, insurance, delivery distance, staffing and a dozen other things that have nothing to do with web design. Scoring it would mean judging business decisions we can't see.
What we can see is whether a renter can find pricing information and make sense of it on the pages we read. That falls under booking and conversion, one of the five categories. The point isn't the number on the price tag. It's whether a parent planning a party can figure out what they'd pay without making three phone calls.
Why Google ratings are left out
Google star ratings are useful to renters, and we'd never tell anyone to ignore them. But they measure customer experience, and our scores measure websites. Mixing the two would blur both.
There's also a fairness problem. Review counts grow with time and volume, so older and larger companies pile them up faster. A newer business with a better website would be stuck behind a wall of reviews it hasn't had time to collect.
There's one nuance worth being clear about. If a website shows reviews or testimonials on its own pages, that can count as a trust signal, because it's part of what a renter sees when deciding whether to book. The scorer reads what's on the page. It doesn't pull star ratings from Google or anywhere else.
Why years in business is left out
"Since 2004" on a home page can be reassuring, and a site that tells renters who runs the business and how long they've been at it is doing something useful. But the number itself isn't scored. A company that opened last spring can build a better website than one that's been around for twenty years, and when it does, the ranking should show it.
Why billing is left out, completely
This is the one we take most seriously. Paying for a plan never changes a score or a rank. Claiming a listing doesn't either. Billing data isn't an input to the scorer, and the ranking code never reads it.
Paid plans add private website coaching and a faster rescore, so a change can show up sooner. The score itself still comes from the same review everyone else gets. If rankings could be bought, they'd be worthless to renters, to operators and to anyone citing them. The full rankings are free to browse for that reason too.
The same rule covers enhanced profiles. Anything an owner adds to their profile is shown on the site, labeled as owner-provided, and never feeds the score.
What the score does measure
With all of that set aside, what's left is the website itself. Every listed site is reviewed on its home page, plus its bounce house and water slide pages when it has them. Each page is reviewed three times and the results are averaged. The score is built from five categories of roughly equal weight: technical health, search intent and structure, trust signals, AI-answer readiness, and booking and conversion. The individual checks and how they're weighted stay private so the scoring can't be gamed, but the categories and the process are all on the methodology page.
Some things you might expect to be missing do show up, but only as far as they appear on the pages we read. Site speed, visible reviews and ease of booking matter in that indirect way. A slow, confusing booking flow hurts because a renter would feel it, not because we looked up a metric somewhere else.
And because scores rate websites only, they never rate service quality, safety, insurance or prices. A high score means a strong website. It doesn't vouch for the company behind it.
If you run a rental business
Look at the list above and notice what isn't on it. You can't change how many years you've been open, and you shouldn't change your prices to chase a ranking. What you can change is the website a renter lands on.
Pull up your home page and your bounce house page on your phone. Can someone tell what you rent, where you deliver, roughly what it costs and how to book, without calling you? That's the ground the score covers, and it's the same ground for every business, large or small.
You can see where websites stand in the national and state rankings, browse each state's number one website, or check when your region is next due on the rescore calendar. If something looks wrong, the methodology page explains how to ask for a correction or a re-review, the FAQ answers common questions, and if your business isn't listed yet, you can submit it.
Figures in this post come from the data published on 2026-11-03 (Website Scorer v2.2.0 (248 questions)). Corrections are welcome; see the methodology.