How we score.

Every provider page and comparison shows a headline score out of 10 with a band (Good, Very Good, Excellent). It's the average of four categories, each computed from crawled facts — and each provider page shows the one-line reason behind every category, so you can see exactly why a number is what it is.

Where a category can't be computed — a provider with no public price, or no Google review presence — it's left out of that provider's breakdown rather than guessed.

Behind the scenes, five audience axes (0–100) rank providers for the sort tabs, the use-case pages — where they show as the per-audience “Match” figure — and the quiz's matching engine. The provider score you see everywhere else is the 0–10 above. (Cheapest-first ordering doesn't use an axis at all — it ranks directly on the sale-adjusted price of a year of cover.)

Seven questions. Each one nudges specific axes:

• Vehicle type. Influences EV / older-car weighting.
• Vehicle age. Older cars need unlimited callouts, skip age-capped providers.
• Driving frequency. More miles → recovery matters more.
• Trip type. Long motorway → Onward Travel + National Recovery; local → Roadside is enough.
• Home Start preference. Direct yes/no/uncertain question.
• Long-distance trips. Drives the National Recovery threshold.
• Priority. Cheapest / good value / strong cover / hassle-free.

Every morning a scraper pulls each provider's public entry price from their own page. If a provider is quote-led with no public list price (Green Flag, Saga), the price field stays empty rather than guessing — those providers sort to the bottom of cheapest-first lists, and their Affordability category is left out rather than invented.

Today's tracked price is what shows on each provider card, dated. Yesterday's price (if it changed) appears as the delta on /compare-breakdown-cover.

The score is recomputed on every crawl. If a provider cuts price overnight, their Affordability moves the next morning. If their Google rating drifts, Customer experience follows. Nothing is frozen — the number you see reflects the most recent run, dated on every provider page.

• Commission. We treat every provider in the database the same way, with or without an affiliate deal.
• Brand recognition. AA and RAC don't get a popularity boost.
• Editorial preference. There is no per-provider hand-tuning. The formula is the formula.

Google review ratings arein the formula — they drive the Customer experience category, weighted by review volume. That's a deliberate change from earlier versions of this methodology, which ignored reviews entirely.

10providers today. We add new ones as we set up affiliate relationships. Halfords, Aviva, and a handful of others we'd like to add aren't crawled yet — once they are, they get the same scoring as everyone else.

Every provider page shows the source URLs the crawler pulled. Distinctive angles (Defaqto 5-star, "underwritten by LV=", etc.) are footnoted with the matched sentence and source URL. If something looks wrong, email hello@coverkit.co.uk and we'll look.