The California Score, Step by Step
Each of the 322 city guides carries a City Search Competition Index. This page walks through how it is calculated, which public files feed it and where the method runs out, so you can decide how much to trust it.
Formula
From Raw Data to a 0-100 Score
- Pick the county. Each city is assigned the county that holds most of its residents.
- Read the county. From County Business Patterns we take two county-level measures: how competitive the county's local-search industries are, and how many of those businesses there are per 10,000 residents. The industries are the ones that live on Google and the map: restaurants and salons, auto repair, accounting and insurance, real estate, physicians and dentists, landscaping, remodeling, electrical work, roofing, plumbing and HVAC, law offices and janitorial services.
- Read the city. From the American Community Survey we take the city's median household income and its residents per square mile.
- Rank all four. Within the 322 California cities, each measure becomes a percentile from 0 to 100.
- Average them. The four percentiles count equally. The mean is the score.
Sources
The Public Files Behind Every Number
No figure on a city guide comes from client accounts or from guesses.
| Source | What we take from it | Period |
|---|---|---|
| American Community Survey, 5-year estimates | Population, income, age, housing, language, commuting, education, industries | 2018-2022 |
| Census Population Estimates | City population change since 2020 | 2020 to 2023 |
| County Business Patterns | Employer locations by industry, per county | 2017 and 2022 |
| Census Gazetteer | City center and land area | 2023 |
All files are published by the U.S. Census Bureau.
Choosing the cities
Why These 322 Places
The set is a selection of California cities and towns, not every place in the state. It includes ten larger unincorporated communities that the Census reports as places of their own. A community the Census does not report separately cannot be profiled, because there would be no figures to show.
Local research for each page starts with municipal and county sites, chambers of commerce and economic development offices. We record neighborhoods, employers and local quirks in a research file, then write from that file and the data. Each page is checked against every other page we publish, here and on our other sites, and rewritten if the checks find shared sentences or overlapping phrasing.
Limits
Where the Method Stops
- Competition is a business count. It says nothing about search volume, rankings or traffic, and we promise no timeline.
- County figures stand in for the city. A county can be far bigger than the city inside it, and every page says so.
- Small places carry wide error bars. ACS estimates for small cities can be off by a lot, so treat close scores as ties.
- Top codes. The Census reports median income of $250,001 or more and median home value of $2,000,001 or more as those capped figures.
- Staffless businesses are missing. Sole proprietors with no employees do not appear in County Business Patterns.
Next step
Spot Something Odd in the Numbers?
Tell us which figure looks wrong and we will trace it back to its Census source. Call 610-825-4363 or email hello@getphound.com.