Someone searches for what you do. Someone has to appear first. Here is exactly how SPAN decides the order — and what you can change today.
Someone opens SPAN and searches for what you do. Twelve people match. Someone has to be first.
For a long time that was simply whoever joined most recently. It was fair in the sense that a lottery is fair — it just had nothing to do with whether you were the right person for the job.
That changed. Here is exactly how the order is decided now, so you can do something about it.
SPAN does not add your numbers up into a secret rating. It goes down a list, in order, and the first thing that separates two providers decides which one is higher. The next item only gets a say when there is a genuine tie.
That matters, because it means you can always tell why someone is above you. There is no black box to argue with.
1. Achievements. The badges you unlock as you use SPAN — completing jobs, keeping your profile current, staying responsive. They sit first because they are the only signal that reflects sustained activity rather than a single afternoon of setup.
2. Profile completion. The same percentage the app shows you on your own profile. A photo, your real name, a phone number. It costs you five minutes and it is the difference between looking like a business and looking like an empty page.
3. Jobs done. Bookings actually completed through SPAN. Not jobs you say you did — jobs a client booked and confirmed. This is the number that grows on its own once the first two are in place.
4. Posts. Photos of your work, visible on your profile. Three is the point where a profile starts reading as a portfolio instead of a placeholder. Every post after that counts too.
5. Joining date. When everything above ties, the newer account goes first. This is the old behaviour, now doing the job it is actually good at: breaking a tie between two people who look identical.
If the person searching has shared their location, distance comes first — because a search for someone nearby is a search about distance, and no amount of profile polish makes you closer.
The chain above then settles everything distance leaves tied, which in practice is most of it: a dozen providers in the same neighbourhood are all "near", and the list above decides who the client sees first.
There is no paid placement. You cannot buy a higher position on SPAN, and there is no plan that sells one.
It also does not touch the suggestions on the Search tab — that list is for browsing when you have not typed anything, and it deliberately shows you newer accounts so nobody is invisible on their first day.
Open your profile and finish it — the app tells you what is missing. Then add three photos of work you have already done. That is most of the list, and it takes one sitting.
The rest — jobs and achievements — comes from using SPAN normally. Which is the point: the ranking rewards the things that make a client want to hire you anyway.