Methodology
How these lists are built
The score
Every shop carries two numbers: its raw Google rating, and a weighted score. The weighted score is what sets the order.
A raw average hides how many people stood behind it. A 4.9 from 300 reviews is a weaker claim than a 4.8 from 7,000, because the second shop has survived twenty times as many chances to disappoint. So each rating is pulled toward its state average in proportion to how few reviews sit behind it, using a prior of 600 reviews. A shop with 600 reviews carries half its own average and half the state mean. A shop with 6,000 carries mostly its own.
Both figures print on every entry, so the working is checkable.
Two locations per chain
A ranking can be arithmetically correct and useless to read. Before this rule, 28 state lists included one where 6 of the 10 entries were branches of the same company. No chain now takes more than 2 slots on any list. The branches that get cut still appear on their own city page, where a single location is legitimately the best option locally.
What gets excluded
- Anything Google lists as permanently or temporarily closed.
- Anything not listed under a cannabis retail category.
- Anything outside the state whose list it turned up in. A search for shops in Detroit returns results in Colorado, and 4225 entries survived after those were dropped.
- Any shop with no rating at all, since there is nothing to rank it on.
Photographs
A photo appears on an entry only if it shows that specific building in good quality. Staff portraits, customers, product close-ups, marketing graphics and images carrying another party's watermark are all rejected. Where nothing survives that test, the entry carries an illustration instead, which is why a handful do.
How often it changes
Quarterly. Ratings move, shops close, and a list nobody rechecks becomes a directory of places that used to be good. Every page carries the month it was last verified.