How the directory is ordered, and what is not for sale
Every legal directory you have used sells position. Avvo, FindLaw and the rest put whoever paid at the top and hope the ordering reads as merit. We do not, and this page exists so you can hold us to it. Here is the exact rule that orders the directory, what money can buy, and what it cannot.
Nobody can pay to rank higher. Nobody can pay to be verified. Everybody qualified is listed free. What a professional can buy is a better profile and to hear about inquiries — never a better position.
The ordering rule, in order
Applied top to bottom. Each rule only breaks ties left by the one above.
| Rule | What it means | |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Your state, then your distance | A professional licensed in your state comes before one who is not, and there is no exception to this. Within that, nearer comes first. |
| 2 | Verification status | A professional whose license we have checked against the issuing body comes before one who has claimed a profile but not been checked. |
| 3 | How recently the verification was re-run | A license checked this quarter comes before the same license checked a year ago. This is the only part of the order a professional can improve by doing something, and what they have to do is keep their license in good standing. |
| 4 | Whether they answer | Once the boards are open, a professional who responds comes before one who never has. Measured on response, never on outcome, and never on whether they took the case. |
| 5 | Alphabetically | When everything above ties, which is often. Not by who paid. |
The one paid category, and where it sits
The discount an advertiser must offer you is governed by five published rules — it has to be money off the move, work on the telephone, outlast the listing, carry no minimum that excludes a small move, and not be a code already sitting on coupon sites. They are set out in full on how we make money, along with what we can and cannot count about them.
Moving companies, self-storage operators and move managers can pay to appear here. They appear in a strip headed Paid placement, outside the ranked results, never mixed into them — the arrangement described further down this page, now actually in use.
Three things are true of it and all three are checkable:
- They pass one published test and nothing more, and we never say otherwise. An advertiser’s federal authority must be active, and a broker’s homepage must carry the broker disclosure that 49 CFR § 371.107(c) requires — the same check we teach readers to run on this page, taking about a minute. Nothing else about them has been looked at: not complaints, not crews, not contracts. A verified professional had a license checked against the issuing body. An advertiser passed a one-minute test and paid us. The Cusp Verified mark is not available to them at any price, because a mark that can be bought means nothing.
- They must give our readers a discount, and that is the condition of being here. Not a gesture — a code a reader can actually use. A company unwilling to offer readers a better deal than it offers the street has told us what it thinks of them.
- Reader reports end a listing, and payment buys no exemption. The same rule that governs agents governs advertisers: enough credible reports and the listing goes, whatever is left on it. We would rather refund an advertiser than keep one you told us about.
And separately from any of that, we tell you how to check a moving company yourself against the government’s free records. We would rather you did that than take our word, or an advertiser’s.
What is not for sale
- Position in the ranked list. Not for any amount, from anybody, ever.
- The Cusp Verified badge. It means a license was checked. It cannot mean anything else and stay worth having.
- Inclusion. Every professional holding an active license in a listed discipline is listed whether they pay us anything or not.
- Removal of a competitor, or suppression of an honest review.
- The wording of a listing’s factual part — license, discipline, state, standing.
What a professional can pay for
We do have to make money, and we would rather tell you exactly how than pretend otherwise. The full version is here.
| What | What it does, and does not, do |
|---|---|
| A claimed profile | Their own description, photograph, practice areas, intake link and availability, in place of the bare license record. Does not move them up. |
| Lead notifications | An email when somebody in their area uses the directory. Does not move them up. |
| Paid placement, labeled as such | A card in a separate strip headed Paid placement, outside the ranked results, visually distinct, never interleaved. If we ever cannot tell these apart at a glance, we have broken this page. |
A rule like this is easy to write when nobody has paid you yet and very hard to write afterwards. So it goes up now, dated, and any change to it will appear here with the date it changed rather than being edited quietly. If you ever find a paid listing inside the ranked results, that is a bug or a broken promise, and either way we want to know. Tell us.
Version 1, 31 August 2026.