Scio ConsultingNearshore software provider in Morelia, Mexico

Whether the company is who it says it is, where it says it is. A register record, delivery locations with addresses, and named people carrying public professional profiles. Nothing here is about quality — it is about whether there is something to hold to account.

• A1

  Entity registration

  4/8

  A record in a national companies or tax register, with the formation date and the legal name matching the name the company trades under. Where a country publishes no register we may query, this leaves the scale entirely — no company chose its registrar.

  What we found

• A2

  Delivery footprint

  3/9

  Where the work is actually done. An address is the claim; a second country is reach. A published headcount per site adds to it, because "we have an office there" and "forty people work there" are different statements.

  What we found1 location across 1 country; 1 with a street address.

• A3

  Team verifiability

  0/8

  Named executives, and how many of them carry a public professional profile a reader can open. A company that will not name the people running it is asking for trust it has offered nothing for.

  What we foundNo named leadership and no sourced headcount.

What the company puts on the record about work it has delivered, and what it has in the open as an engineering organisation. Deliberately "published" rather than "verified": a buyer can read the same pages we did.

• B1

  Case studies published

  Partially checked

  How many case studies the company publishes, in bands rather than exactly. Scored from its own index rather than from a homepage carousel, which would undercount a real portfolio.

  The check ran and could not cover everything it needed. Out of the denominator.

• B2

  Case study specificity

  Partially checked

  Whether those case studies say anything checkable: the client named, the outcome quantified, the stack and the team composition stated. Magnitude is deliberately not scored — the largest figure on a portfolio page is almost always a company-wide total, and rewarding it would reward the vaguest writing.

  The check ran and could not cover everything it needed. Out of the denominator.

• B3

  Engineering footprint

  Pending verification

  Public code and technical writing: a GitHub organisation, repositories, contributions in the last twelve months, a blog with real depth. A services company with nothing in the open is not disqualified — it has simply not offered this particular evidence.

  Not measured yet. These points are out of the denominator — the gap counts against us, never against the company.

What clients said somewhere the company does not control. Read from independent review platforms rather than from testimonials on its own site, because a testimonial is a quote the company chose to keep.

• C1

  Review volume

  No queryable source

  How many reviews exist across independent platforms, in bands. A precise count would reward a company for the exact number of clients it remembered to ask, which is not the thing being measured.

  What we foundThe review platforms serving this market answer an automated request with a bot challenge, including on robots.txt. We honour that, so no company here is scored on third-party reviews — and none is marked down for the access policy of a platform it does not control.

  The review platforms serving this market answer an automated request with a bot challenge, including on robots.txt. We honour that, so no company here is scored on third-party reviews — and none is marked down for the access policy of a platform it does not control.

• C2

  Rating quality

  No queryable source

  The rating, weighted by how many reviews stand behind it, so a 5.0 from two does not outrank a 4.7 from ninety.

  What we foundThe review platforms serving this market answer an automated request with a bot challenge, including on robots.txt. We honour that, so no company here is scored on third-party reviews — and none is marked down for the access policy of a platform it does not control.

  The review platforms serving this market answer an automated request with a bot challenge, including on robots.txt. We honour that, so no company here is scored on third-party reviews — and none is marked down for the access policy of a platform it does not control.

• C3

  Review recency

  No queryable source

  How old the newest review is. An excellent rating from 2019 describes a company that may no longer exist in the same form.

  What we foundThe review platforms serving this market answer an automated request with a bot challenge, including on robots.txt. We honour that, so no company here is scored on third-party reviews — and none is marked down for the access policy of a platform it does not control.

  The review platforms serving this market answer an automated request with a bot challenge, including on robots.txt. We honour that, so no company here is scored on third-party reviews — and none is marked down for the access policy of a platform it does not control.

• C4

  Platform breadth

  No queryable source

  Whether reviews appear on more than one platform. One platform is a channel the company chose and can curate; two are harder to shape.

  What we foundThe review platforms serving this market answer an automated request with a bot challenge, including on robots.txt. We honour that, so no company here is scored on third-party reviews — and none is marked down for the access policy of a platform it does not control.

  The review platforms serving this market answer an automated request with a bot challenge, including on robots.txt. We honour that, so no company here is scored on third-party reviews — and none is marked down for the access policy of a platform it does not control.

Authority and page experience, scored against the company’s own cohort rather than an absolute. A twelve-person studio and a two-thousand-person firm do not compete for the same links, and one scale for both would be measuring size.

• D1

  Site trust & experience

  0/6

  The pages a procurement team looks for — privacy, terms, security, a data processing agreement — plus whether the site passes Core Web Vitals. Both are things a buyer meets before a salesperson.

  What we foundNone of the pages a procurement team looks for were found.

• D2

  Search authority

  2.55/7

  Domain rating, referring domains and organic traffic, expressed as a percentile of the company’s cohort. Where the cohort is too thin to establish a distribution this scores pending rather than inventing a benchmark.

  What we foundDR 28, 2263 referring domains — dr 15th pct, refdomains 65th pct, org_traffic 40th pct of the 20-company cohort.

• D3

  Content & structured data

  2/4

  Whether the site carries structured data a machine can read, and how much ground its content actually covers.

  What we foundOrganization schema detected

• D4

  AI citations

  Pending verification

  Whether assistants cite the company when asked about this market. New, and weighted at three points accordingly — a company with none of it is not being marked down for missing something the market has not settled on.

  Not measured yet. These points are out of the denominator — the gap counts against us, never against the company.

What a buyer can find out before anyone answers the phone: the price, the shared hours, who owns the code, what the security posture is. The pillar most providers score worst on, and the one buyers ask about first.

• E1

  Commercial terms

  1/5

  A published price, the engagement models on offer, and a stated minimum. The single most useful thing a provider can put on its site, and the thing almost none of them do — which is exactly why it is worth points.

  What we foundEngagement models: staff augmentation, dedicated teams, build-operate-transfer.

• E2

  Overlap & languages

  Pending verification

  Stated overlap hours with United States business hours, and the working languages. The whole premise of nearshore is the shared working day, so a provider that does not state its hours has left its main argument unmade.

  Not measured yet. These points are out of the denominator — the gap counts against us, never against the company.

• E3

  Security & compliance

  Pending verification

  Security certifications and a published data processing agreement. Scored only where a certification carries a citable statement — a logo in a footer is not evidence of a SOC 2 report, and treating it as one would reward the cheapest signal.

  Not measured yet. These points are out of the denominator — the gap counts against us, never against the company.

• E4

  Contracting & IP

  Pending verification

  Whether the company states in writing who owns the code. Two points, because it is a single sentence on a page — and because its absence is common enough that it does not distinguish much.

  Not measured yet. These points are out of the denominator — the gap counts against us, never against the company.