Methodology

This page explains, in plain terms, how the assessment turns your answers into a recommendation.

What affects your recommendation

Every question you answer contributes to how each product is scored. Broadly, the assessment weighs:

• The assets you need to track and your primary tracking problem — these have the most influence on your results.
• Explicit hard requirements— needs like dash cameras, public API access, or full preventive maintenance carry significant weight, and a product that clearly can't meet one of these cannot become your top recommendation.
• Fleet or asset count — this distinguishes small-business tools from mid-market and enterprise platforms.
• Maintenance needs and driver-safety requirements — these moderately shape your results.
• Tracking frequency, installation preference, integrations, and budget — these have a lighter, more fine-tuning influence.
• Business type and contract preference — these have the lightest influence, mainly personalizing your results rather than driving them.
• Purchase timeline — this does not affect your score. We ask it only to understand our visitors.

How product scores are calculated

Each product is rated on a fixed set of capabilities — for example, how well it supports heavy-equipment tracking, battery-powered installation, or dash-camera-based safety monitoring. Your answers convert into weighted requirements, and we score how well each product's rated capabilities match those requirements.

The score reflects only the requirements you actually stated. If you tell us you don't need something — driver monitoring, say, or software integrations — that topic is left out of the calculation entirely rather than counted against every product. A match score therefore means the same thing whether you came in with a long list of requirements or a short one.

Some requirements are treated as critical: if a product clearly doesn't support something you explicitly asked for — like public API access or dash cameras — it can still appear as an alternative, but it cannot become your top recommendation, and the missing capability is disclosed.

We also apply a limited adjustment based on recurring themes in independent, publicly available customer feedback — how reliable a product's tracking is reported to be, how easy it is to use, and how consistent support experiences are. Products with less public evidence available are scored more conservatively toward a neutral baseline, rather than assumed to be average or better. This adjustment is capped and can never override the fit-based score above — customer reviews cannot manufacture a capability a product doesn't have.

The result is converted into the “match score” percentage you see on your results page, along with a match category (such as “Strong match” or “Good match”) and an evidence confidence label describing how much public feedback that score is informed by. We don't publish the exact point values assigned to each answer, since doing so would make the assessment easy to game rather than reflect your actual needs.

Vendor compensation does not affect scoring

We may receive compensation when you contact or purchase from a recommended provider. That compensation has no role in the scoring rules above — the same rules are applied to every product regardless of whether it is a sponsored link.

Verify product details independently

Product features, pricing, hardware compatibility, coverage, contract terms, and integrations may change over time and can vary by region or account. Confirm current details directly with a vendor before making a purchasing decision.

No guarantees

Recommendations are informational. They do not guarantee any particular outcome, including theft prevention, theft recovery, cost savings, or product performance.