Methodology v1.3 · April 2026

Our editorial policy.

Incorporator is the journal of U.S. formation. That phrasing is a constraint: rankings are earned, not bought; corrections travel with the article; the affiliate link is the last thing we think about, not the first. This page is how we hold ourselves to it.

Four factors, weighted, in that order.

Every comparative page — state guides, best-LLC-services rankings, entity comparisons — is scored on the same four factors. Scores are integers, 0–100. The weights are below and they are published on each ranking.

1. № 01

   Weight · 30%

   Price transparency

   The number you see at checkout should be the number you pay. Services that hide registered-agent renewal, "premium support," or state fees behind pre-checked boxes score badly.

2. № 02

   Weight · 25%

   Registered-agent privacy

   Whether the service sells, markets against, or publicises your registered-agent data. Reselling to spammers is an automatic -10.

3. № 03

   Weight · 25%

   Support quality

   Response time on a real question, whether a human answers the first message, and whether they can resolve it without escalation.

4. № 04

   Weight · 20%

   Absence of dark patterns

   Pre-checked upsells, fake countdowns, forced "premium" trials, and deceptive cancellation flows. Each one is a penalty.

What's editorial, what's paid, how we keep them apart.

Some outbound links on Incorporator.org are affiliate links. If you click one and sign up for a service, we may receive a commission. The price you pay is not affected — these are negotiated commissions, not surcharges.

• §
  Rankings are locked before outreach

  We finalise every comparative ranking based on the four-factor methodology before we contact any service about an affiliate relationship. Declining a partnership does not move a service up or down. This is the non-negotiable wall.

• §
  No sponsored placements

  We do not publish paid rankings, "sponsored" spots on comparison tables, or reviews written by the company being reviewed. If it reads like an ad, it is an ad, and we don't run ads.

• §
  Updated, not just dated

  Every comparison and state guide carries a visible "Updated" month. A cron sweep re-queues any article whose freshness is older than sixty days.

• §
  Corrections travel with the article

  When we materially change a ranking or a fact, we note it inline at the bottom of the article with the date, the change, and a short reason.

Freshness is a promise, not a stamp.

A 2024 review that's now quietly wrong is worse than no review at all. Here's what is checked, and how often.

If we got it wrong, tell us.

Send the correction through our contact page. Material changes — a mis-stated fee, a wrong requirement, a ranking that no longer reflects the methodology — are annotated at the bottom of the article with the date and a short note of what changed.

Stylistic edits (typos, clarifications) are not annotated, but the underlying prose is versioned in git so the history is recoverable.

Last reviewed April 2026. Significant changes to this policy will be noted here with a change-log entry.