Methodology
This page is the contract between us and everyone who reads this site. If we ever break a rule written here, the site is not worth reading. Please hold us to it.
What we are, and what we are not
VA Index is an independent index of virtual assistant companies. We do not supply virtual assistants, place staff, broker deals, take a commission on any engagement, or accept payment to recommend a provider. We are not affiliated with any company listed here, and we are not an auditor or a certification body.
Where the data comes from
Every field is taken from a page the company itself publishes, or from an independent review platform. We do not use private data, and we do not contact companies to ask for figures they have not published — what a company chooses to publish is itself part of what we are recording.
When we record a figure, we store the sentence it came from, the URL, and the date. A quote that cannot be matched against the archived page is discarded, not published. That check is mechanical: the sentence either appears in the source or it does not.
How we collect pages
We think a directory that publishes other companies’ data owes them a plain account of how it was gathered. So, precisely:
| We identify ourselves | Our crawler sends VAIndexBot/1.0 (+https://vaindex.com/methodology; [email protected]). We do not disguise it as a browser. |
| We obey robots.txt | If a domain’s robots.txt cannot be read, we do not crawl it at all. Disallowed paths are skipped and recorded as skipped. |
| We go slowly | At most one request every four seconds per domain, at most a dozen pages per site, re-checked monthly. We are not a load on anyone’s server. |
| We never work around a barrier | Login walls, paywalls, bot checks, 403s — we stop and record the field as not disclosed. We do not rotate addresses, solve challenges, or use logged-in sessions. |
| We only read public business pages | Pricing, FAQ, about, compliance. Nothing behind an account, nothing from a private source. |
| We do not collect data about individuals | No assistant names, photos, CVs, personal emails or phone numbers — ever. This index is about companies. Individual assistants never agreed to be listed anywhere, and we have no business putting them in a searchable database. |
| We quote, we don’t republish | Quotes are capped at roughly a sentence. We do not reproduce third-party review text, and we do not rewrite a company’s own description as if it were ours. |
If you would rather we did not crawl your site at all, say so at [email protected] and we will stop — no conditions attached.
What each badge means
| ✓ Verified from source | Quoted verbatim from the company’s own page and matched against our archived copy of it. Click the ⓘ to read the sentence and open the source. |
| ◇ Third-party data | Taken from an independent source rather than the company itself. Not currently in use — review-platform ratings are on hold while we work out a route that respects those platforms’ terms. We would rather show nothing than scrape something we shouldn’t. |
| ❝ Company-stated | A claim the company makes that we cannot independently check — typically HIPAA, BAAs, background checks, certifications. We report the claim. We do not endorse it. Verify these yourself before signing anything. |
| — Not publicly disclosed | We looked and found nothing. The pages we checked are listed. This is not a gap in our data; it is a fact about the company. |
On compliance claims
How ordering works — and what money cannot buy
Default ordering on every listing page is alphabetical by company name. Nothing else.
We find and add companies ourselves, for free, whether or not they know we exist. That is how every record currently on this site got here. It stays the default because it is the only way the index can approach completeness.
We will never be complete, though. New providers launch, small ones are invisible to search, and our crawler only knows what we have thought to look for. So there is also a submission route — anyone can tell us about a company we have missed, including the company itself, and that is free too.
Later, a company in a hurry will be able to pay to jump the crawl queue. That is the only thing that money will buy: speed, and the right to hand us more source material. A paid submission goes through the same pipeline, the same quote-verification gates and the same badges as every other record. It can and will produce an unflattering entry if that is what the company’s own website supports.
Money can only ever buy more information about a company. It can never buy a better position, and it can never buy less information.
When paid tiers open, a paying company will be able to:
- claim its record and submit additional documentation, which we publish and label
- have its listing visually highlighted, and its outbound link set to
do-follow - request an out-of-cycle re-check after it changes something
No amount of money will ever affect:
- the default ordering of any listing page
- the content, wording, or verification status of any field
- whether a company appears in the index at all
- whether unflattering data — undisclosed pricing, long lock-ins, who signs the BAA — is shown
- whether a company can be removed (see below)
Paid listings are labelled as such wherever they appear. If you ever find a case where this is not true, tell us, and we will fix it publicly.
How often data is re-checked
Every record is re-checked monthly. Fields that have not changed have their “last verified” date updated. Fields that have changed are re-extracted and reviewed before publication. Each company page shows both the last check and the next scheduled one.
We also keep a small hand-verified reference set and re-run it whenever the pipeline changes. If field-level accuracy against that set drops below our threshold, the change does not ship.
Corrections, claims and removal
- Something is wrong. Email [email protected] with the page and the field. We respond within 24 hours, and a field shown to be wrong is corrected the same day and stamped with the correction date.
- You work at a listed company. You can claim your record and correct it yourself, free, permanently. Corrections are sanity-checked, not gatekept. You can also send us anything we could not find on your site — a rate card, a sample BAA, a term sheet — and we will publish it and say where it came from.
- Your page is out of date. Tell us and we re-check it immediately, ahead of the monthly cycle. This is free and always will be.
Removal — free, unconditional, no questions
Any listed company can have its entry taken down by asking. No fee, no conditions, no negotiation, no “tell us why”. One email to [email protected] from a company address and the page is gone within one working day.
We would rather you stayed and corrected us. But we are not going to argue with a company about whether it may leave, and we are not going to make leaving expensive or awkward. A directory that has to hold companies against their will is not one you should trust about anything else.
Two things you should know before you ask, because they are part of the deal:
- The company page and the comparison row come down. Aggregate figures stay. Statements like “of 30 healthcare providers studied, 17 publish no hourly rate” continue to count every company we have studied, including delisted ones. Nothing identifying is retained or republished — no name, no quote, no link. We say this here, in advance, so that nobody is surprised by it later.
- We publish a running count of removals — how many, and when. Not who. Readers need to know that this table is not the whole market; they do not need to know which company asked, and naming you would turn a policy into a punishment.
What we would rather do instead: publish your response next to the data, in your own words, unedited. If a figure is missing context, send us the context and we will run it. That offer stands whether or not you ever pay us anything.
Removal log
No company has asked to be removed. This count is published whether it flatters us or not; if it climbs, you will see it climb.
Known limitations
We can only verify that a company said something — not that what it said is true. Where information sits behind a contact form, a PDF or a sales call, we cannot record it, and we mark it as not disclosed rather than guessing. Some sites block automated access; those records will be sparser than others, and that is a limitation of ours, not a judgement about the company.