Ranking and Placement

1. Paid featured placements

Active, paid featured placements come first. They are shown above the organic (unpaid) results — on the homepage, on the first page of a category page, on a town page, or above the results of a search query that unambiguously names one category — and are permanently, clearly, and non-dismissibly labelled "Anzeige" ("Ad"), as required by § 5a UWG. Within the paid slots of a given placement, only the order set by the operator decides position; it has nothing to do with either of the two criteria below.

2. Quality score

For every other, unpaid listing, the second-ranking factor is the quality_score — a deterministic value from 0 to 100, recalculated automatically whenever a profile changes. It depends solely on which profile fields a business has filled in: logo, cover image, description length, opening hours, contact details, geodata, commercial-register or VAT details, and social-media links. It scores only the completeness of this information, never the quality of its content. The description counts once it reaches 300 characters; any additional length beyond that earns no further points.

On individual town pages (/ort/…), organic listings are first grouped by their main category; the order of the groups themselves follows the operator's own category taxonomy. There, the quality_score decides the order of listings within a group, not the order of the groups.

3. Alphabetical order

Where the quality_score is tied, the final tie-break is the alphabetical order of the company name.

4. Relevance in company search

The company-search results page (/suche) works differently: there, the textual relevance of the search query determines the order first, ahead of the quality_score. Among the matches found by this full-text analysis, relevance weights the company name most heavily, followed by its category, then its description, and finally its location; when relevance ties there, the quality_score and, after that, the alphabetical order of the company name decide. When the full-text analysis finds no match, the search also falls back to matching part of the company name — needed because German stemming reduces "Bäcker" (baker) and "Bäckerei" (bakery) to different word stems. Such matches carry no textual relevance and therefore rank below every full-text match; within that group, the quality_score and then alphabetical order decide.

Where a search query recognisably names exactly one category, that category's placements appear above the results, labelled "Anzeige" ("Ad"). The order of the search results themselves is unaffected by this and cannot be bought.

What a paid placement does — and does not — change

Payment affects only whether a listing is pinned into a labelled featured slot. A listing placed that way is removed from the organic result list rather than shown there a second time — every organic listing that follows it then moves up by one position. Payment never changes a business's quality_score, never reorders the organic result list, and never affects position within that list under any circumstances — not even through a more extensive, paid profile upgrade.

Money cannot buy: removal or suppression of a competitor's listing, exclusivity within a category or town, or a better position within the organic result list.

Slots and minimum thresholds

The number of featured slots available at any one time is capped per placement: up to 6 slots on the homepage, up to 3 slots per category, and on town pages up to 3 slots for the city of Schweinfurt and up to 2 slots per district municipality. On a town page, a featured placement only appears once that town has at least 5 published business listings — in a smaller town, a paid placement would otherwise dominate the page disproportionately compared to the organic listings.