Metrics
Aggregate rating
An aggregate rating is the combined score derived from multiple individual ratings for the same entity.
Different platforms aggregate differently. Booking.com uses a 10-point scale with weighted sub-scores; Google uses a straight mean of published reviews; Yelp weights by its recommendation software, which excludes filtered reviews from the visible average entirely.
This is why the same business can show materially different scores across platforms without any inconsistency in the underlying service.
In practice
Compare each platform against its own history rather than against each other, and understand which reviews are being excluded from the visible number.
Common questions
- Why is my Yelp rating lower than my Google one?
- Yelp's recommendation software excludes a portion of reviews from the displayed rating. The two numbers are calculated from different populations.