How LongIsland.io rankings work
Every list on this site is produced independently by our editorial team. Here is exactly how, and what we will not do.
Advertising relationships do not guarantee or determine organic ranking positions.
No business can buy a position on a list, and no advertiser is told in advance what a list will say. Sponsored placements exist on this site, and they are always labelled as sponsored. If we ever cannot tell those two things apart, the rankings stop being worth reading.
What we weigh
No single factor decides a list. These are the inputs, weighted differently depending on what is being ranked.
- Consumer reputation
- What people who have actually been there say, across the public review platforms where they say it. We read the substance, not just the star average.
- Review volume
- A high rating from nine people tells us less than a good rating from nine hundred. Volume is context for a rating, never a substitute for one.
- Local relevance
- Whether a place matters to the people who live near it. A restaurant with a devoted local following in Sayville counts for more here than a chain with national recognition.
- Longevity
- Staying open on Long Island is hard. A business that has held a standard for fifteen years has demonstrated something a new opening has not yet had the chance to.
- Uniqueness
- Whether there is a reason to go there specifically, rather than to the nearest equivalent. We favor places that could not be dropped into another town unchanged.
- Editorial research
- Our own visits, calls and reading. On food lists this means eating the same benchmark dish everywhere so the comparison is fair.
- Public information
- Menus, hours, licensing, service areas and anything else a business publishes about itself.
- Community feedback
- Nominations from readers. These do not earn a spot on their own, but they shape what we go and look at.
What a ranking is, and is not
Rankings are editorial judgments, not objective guarantees. Two reasonable people who ate at the same ten pizzerias would order them differently. What we can promise is that the order reflects research and a consistent standard, not a payment.
Lists get updated. Places change hands, chefs leave, standards slip and new spots open. When that happens we revise the list and the updated date at the top of the page changes with it.
Third-party ratings are not our ratings. Where we reference review scores from other platforms, they belong to those platforms. We do not publish our own numeric score, and we do not restate someone else’s as though we produced it.
We are not comprehensive. A business missing from a list has not been judged and found wanting — more often it simply has not been researched yet. That is what nominations are for.
Corrections and nominations
If something on this site is factually wrong — an address, a phone number, an ownership change, a closure — tell us and we will fix it. Factual corrections are made promptly and without argument.
If you think a business belongs on a list, nominate it. If you are that business, you are welcome to nominate yourself; it carries the same weight as any other nomination, which is to say it gets researched.