Methodology
How we build and check our listings
Every count, rating and service tag on EarthworkScout is computed from one dataset, and this page explains where that dataset comes from, what we keep out of it, and what its limits are.
Where does the data come from?
Public Google Maps business results. In July 2026 we ran 4,945 searches across 989 US cities, five queries per city: excavating contractor, excavation company, land clearing, grading contractor and septic installation. Five instead of the usual three because this trade has two halves, clearing and digging, and a narrower sweep misses one of them. The harvest returned 341,369 raw listing rows.
How do 341,369 rows become 21,051 listings?
The same firm surfaces in many nearby city searches, each time filed under a different single category. We merge those duplicates by Google's own business identifiers, and the merge is where the site's usefulness comes from: the union of all the categories a firm appears under is our evidence for which trades it takes. Maps shows you one category per result; the merged record shows the spread.
Each firm is then assigned to its real city from its own address, not to whichever city we happened to search from. Firms with no usable address that run out of a truck are kept and flagged "mobile, no yard" rather than dropped. After dedupe and cleanup the corpus is 21,051 contractors in 5,894 cities across 51 states, and 10,133 of them show two or more trades.
What do we keep out?
Most of the harvest. These searches are flooded by businesses that never move dirt, so we reject roofers, remodelers, realtors, supply and rental yards, lawn-mowing outfits, and engineers who design sites but do not dig them. Septic listings are kept only where there is evidence of installation work; pump-and-haul operators are dropped, because a new tank or drain field is an excavation job and a pump truck is not. We also never publish links to Google's retired free business sites, which are mostly dead pages.
What does a service tag mean?
A tag means we found evidence of that work in the firm's own business records. A missing tag means we found none, which is not the same as the firm refusing the job. Treat the tags as a floor and ask. We would rather under-claim than put words in a business's mouth.
Where do the ratings come from?
Straight from Google, captured at harvest time, unedited. We do not write reviews, weight them, or take payment to move a firm up a list. Nobody pays to be listed here and nobody pays to rank. 16,979 of the 21,051 listings carry a Google rating; the rest show none, and we leave that gap visible instead of filling it.
What about cities with one or two listings?
They exist, and we are honest about them. A city page with a single contractor still renders for the person who lands there, but we keep those thin pages out of search engines on purpose and the page itself says that one listing is not a market. 1,155 cities carry five or more contractors; those are the pages we treat as real local markets.
How fresh is this data?
The directory renders from a snapshot, currently the July 2026 harvest. Phone numbers, websites and ratings can drift between refreshes, so confirm details with the business before you rely on them. When an owner or a reader reports an error, we correct the listing without waiting for the next full refresh.
Spotted an error?
Tell us and we will fix it. If you run one of the businesses listed, you can correct the trades we show, add your service radius, or claim the listing. Include the business name and city so we can find it quickly: contact us. More about who we are and why this site exists is on the about page.