How we rate running shoes

What We Ask Runners

A review covers an overall rating plus five dimensions: comfort, cushioning, durability, value and appearance, each on a five-point scale. We also ask for context that changes how a rating should be read: how long the runner used the shoe, roughly how many miles they put in, their weekly mileage, their typical surface, whether they would buy the shoe again, and how it compared to the shoe they ran in before it.

The comparison question gives us a direct head-to-head signal between two specific shoes from someone who ran in both, which a star average cannot provide.

Why We Do Not Use A Simple Average

A raw average punishes well-reviewed shoes and flatters lightly-reviewed ones. A shoe with three glowing reviews would sit above a shoe with four hundred reviews averaging slightly lower, even though we know far less about the first one.

We fit a statistical model that estimates each shoe's true rating while accounting for how much evidence there is. A shoe with few reviews is pulled toward the typical rating for shoes like it; as reviews accumulate, the estimate moves toward what its own reviewers actually said. This is why a shoe's score can shift as reviews come in, and why it shifts less the more reviews it already has.

When a shoe has few or no reviews of its own yet, the model needs a starting point. We anchor that starting estimate with aggregated review scores from public retailer listings, the ratings of earlier shoes in the same product line, and the brand's other shoes. As reviews arrive on this site, they outweigh that starting point: the more runners tell us about a shoe directly, the less the starting point and the outside data matter.

Avoiding False Precision

The rating we publish is deliberately cautious: it is the score we are 75% sure the shoe clears. A shoe with little evidence therefore publishes below a proven shoe of the same likely quality, and its rating usually rises as reviews confirm it.

Alongside each rating we publish a confidence score from 0 to 100. A confidence of 70 means the rating is more settled than 70% of the shoes we rate. A shoe with 200 reviews has a high one. A shoe with eight has a lower one. When two shoes rate close together, the gap between them is not meaningful, and we would rather show you that than pretend to a precision we do not have. If a ranking looks close, it probably is.

Presenting Scores

The overall rating and the five dimension ratings are each shown on a 0 to 100 scale, with a label from Exceptional down to Bottom-tier. Each shoe page also places the shoe among the shoes we rate, so you can see how it stands against its actual alternatives. That is more useful than "4.2 stars", since nearly every shoe averages four stars or more.

What We Exclude

• Incomplete and unmoderated reviews. Only reviews that pass moderation and are marked complete count toward a rating or appear on a shoe page.
• Suspected manipulation. Submissions are scored for fraud signals, and anything flagged is held for manual review before it can affect a rating.

How Often Scores Update

The models rerun daily, so a review submitted today reaches a shoe's rating in the next day's run rather than the moment it arrives. Rankings move as the evidence changes.

Corrections

Specs come from a mixture of manufacturer data and retailer feeds, and they are sometimes wrong. If a weight, stack height or drop looks off, or a shoe is categorized badly, see our editorial policy for how corrections are handled.

Add a review for a shoe you have run in. Every review makes the estimate for that shoe a little sharper.