How we pick, describe and rank schools
Updated October 2026
Nobody can pay to rank on Cooking Class Finder. Order comes from four things we can measure, and the formula is below in full.
Who gets listed
Any place that teaches cooking to the public: cooking schools, kitchen stores with classes, chefs’ studios, kids’ schools, bakeries and community kitchens. We list 762 of thems today. Culinary colleges appear with a label when they run classes for the public. Restaurants, caterers and food tours without classes are left out.
Every school is listed the same way, whatever booking software it uses. Cooking Class Finder is run with Occasion, which makes booking software, and schools that use Occasion get no ranking boost.
Pop-up marketplaces such as Cozymeal book independent chefs into venues around a city. They’re useful, but the chef and kitchen change each time, so we show them in their own section and keep them out of rankings unless you ask for them.
The ranking formula
Each school gets a quality score from 0 to 100:
| Part | Weight | What it measures |
|---|---|---|
| Rating | 55% | Google rating and our guest reviews, pulled toward 4.6 as if every school had 25 extra average reviews. So 5.0 from three people doesn’t beat 4.8 from eight hundred. |
| Review volume | 20% | How many reviews in total, on a log scale: the jump from 10 to 100 counts as much as 100 to 1,000. |
| Completeness | 15% | Whether we have a written summary, what it teaches, how classes run (public, private, kids…), an address, opening hours, a photo or logo, a booking or classes page, published prices. |
| Freshness | 10% | How recently we checked the school’s own site. Full marks within 30 days, none after six months. |
Search can also sort by rating, price or distance. Claiming a page doesn’t change the score, except that a school can fill in missing details like anyone else could.
Where the data comes from
- Names, addresses, ratings, review counts and opening hours: Google Maps. Every rating on the site says it’s from Google and when we checked.
- Classes, dates, prices and seats: each school’s own website, read by our crawler about once a week. It respects robots.txt. We can read a schedule for 106 schools so far.
- Guest reviews: written here by people who took a class, checked by a person before they go live.
- What a school teaches and who it suits: worked out from its classes and site. Until the school confirms it, a fact like this is marked “our inference”.
How school summaries are written
A summary says what a school is known for, how its classes run and who they suit. Each sentence has to trace back to the school’s own site, its class listings or reviews. If we can’t check something (parking, BYOB, class size) we leave it out. A person reads the summaries for the biggest cities before they go live. 65 schools have one so far, and we add more every week.
Guest reviews
Anyone who took a class can write one. We check each review before it goes up and remove only spam, personal details or abuse. Schools can reply in public, but they can’t edit or remove reviews, and they can’t pay to hide them. A “Verified booking” mark means we matched the review to a booking.
Corrections and removals
Every school page has a form at the bottom to report a mistake or ask for the page to come down. Owners can also claim their page and edit it themselves. We take a page down when its owner asks.