How Search Results Are Ranked

1. Who appears

Only tutor profiles that TutorBoost has reviewed and approved appear in search. Your filters (subject, language, price, format and others offered) decide which approved profiles are included. Profiles are not removed or hidden because of the price a tutor charges.

2. The default order (“Recommended”)

Unless you choose another sort, results are ordered by these parameters, most important first:

1. Number of reviews from students’ completed lessons, most first.
2. Average rating of those reviews, highest first.
3. Most recently updated profile, first.

The order is the same for everyone who uses the same filters; it is not personalised to you and does not use your browsing history. It is deliberately stable rather than random, so a tutor can see where they appear.

3. When nothing matches

If no tutor matches every filter, we may show the closest matches, found by relaxing the narrowest filters first, under a heading that says they do not match everything you asked for.

4. Other sorts

You can sort by price (lowest or highest first), by rating (highest average first, then number of reviews) or by years of experience (as stated by the tutor). These sorts contain no paid placements.

5. Paid placement

• Featured placement. Where TutorBoost offers it, a tutor can pay to be featured for the subject they teach. In the default “Recommended” order only, up to two tutors who already match your filters and have a live paid placement for their subject are moved to the top of the whole list (so they appear on the first page only), each marked “Featured”. A placement never adds a tutor who does not match your filters. The rest of the list keeps the order in section 2. Placements have no effect in other sorts. When more paying tutors match than there are places, the places rotate daily (UTC) through all of them in the section 2 order, so each is featured on some days.
• Pro. Pro ($49 a month) includes featuring: a Pro tutor counts as having a live paid placement for the subject they teach, so the featured-placement rule above applies to them in exactly the same way: only in the default “Recommended” order, only if they already match your filters, at most two featured tutors, at the top of the first page, each marked “Featured · paid placement”. Pro does not change a tutor’s position in any other way.
• Advertising. Ads funded through the Advertising Programme Terms appear on Facebook and Instagram, not in TutorBoost search, and do not affect ranking.
• The commission rate a tutor pays does not affect ranking.

6. The home page

The tutors shown on the home page rotate every hour through approved profiles, so that each approved tutor is shown in turn. This rotation is not paid for and not personalised.

7. Reviews and how they are checked

• A review can only be left from a student account, for a lesson that was booked through TutorBoost, once per lesson. Our system links every review to that lesson record; it cannot be created without one. That is the check we make; we do not otherwise verify a reviewer’s identity.
• We do not pay for, write, buy or edit reviews, and tutors cannot remove them. We do not hide a review because it is negative.
• We remove a review that is abusive, contains personal information, is not about the lesson, or that we have reason to believe is not genuine. The tutor may reply once.
• Ratings shown on a profile are the average and number of the reviews that are published.

8. Questions

Tutors who want to know more about how they are ranked can ask us; see Complaints and Disputes.