How we pick: methodology
Last updated Oct 8, 2026. Author: CFL Air Pros editorial team, V12 Promotions (Orlando, FL).
1. Who is included
We start with every business in the Florida Department of Business and Professional Regulation (DBPR) construction licensee file (public extract, downloaded Oct 8, 2026) that holds one of these license types: CAC Certified Air Conditioning Contractor, CMC Certified Mechanical Contractor, RA Registered Air Conditioning Contractor, RM Registered Mechanical Contractor. We keep only licenses with primary status “Current” and secondary status “Active” and a future expiry date, with a mailing address in Orange, Seminole, Osceola or Lake county. Licenses that share a normalized business name are merged into one business. That gives 1,124 businesses.
2. How we verify a company
We match a license to a website only if the site shows the DBPR license number, or shows the exact business name plus a Florida location. We do not use Google Maps or Google Places data for content. From the company's own site (following its robots.txt, at most about nine pages per site, read slowly) we record: phone number, service area, services offered, equipment brands named, emergency or 24/7 availability, years in business, financing, and one verbatim quote. Each field stores its source URL, the date checked, and an evidence snippet. A person reviewed the evidence for brand and emergency claims and the selected quote before publication. If we can't verify a field, we leave it out.
3. Who gets a listing page
A company gets its own page only with at least 6 verified fields, including an active license and a working website, and only if the site describes residential AC repair or replacement work. Homebuilders, solar-only, duct-cleaning-only and commercial-only firms stay as license rows. All other licensed businesses still appear in the table on their city page.
4. How lists are ordered
City pages show the “most-documented verified listings”: companies ordered by the number of verified fields, then by years licensed. This measures how much we could verify, not workmanship or customer satisfaction, and we never call it “best.” We don't publish star ratings, and we don't write, buy, or filter reviews.
5. Freshness and accuracy
Every field shows its last-checked date. Before each publishing wave a person audits a random 10% sample of published fields against the sources (target: at least 95% field accuracy). The Oct 8, 2026 audit re-checked 138 fields and found 137 correct; the one error was fixed. We re-check every listing every 90 days, and immediately when someone reports an error.
6. Reputation and complaint records
State discipline. We check every listed license number (and, for unlicensed-activity cases, the business name) against the DBPR Construction Industry Licensing Board discipline reports, FY2021-22 to FY2025-26 (source): the licensed-activity, unlicensed-activity and Recovery Fund files. These cover final orders and citations only. Florida keeps complaints confidential until probable cause is found, so open, dismissed or pre-2021 matters are not shown. Always confirm on the DBPR license lookup.
BBB. When a company's own website links to its BBB business profile, we show that link after checking that it resolves. We don't reproduce BBB ratings, accreditation status or complaint counts, because BBB's terms of use don't allow republishing them.
Google and review sites. We don't copy ratings or reviews from Google Maps, Yelp, Angi or other review sites. We don't show Google ratings.
7. City statistics
License counts, license mix and median years licensed come from DBPR. Services, emergency and brand shares are computed from verified listings only. Housing age is the U.S. Census ACS 2020–2024 5-year median year structure built (table B25035).