Buying guide

How do you vet an AV company before you book?

Check the distribution, not the star average

A mean rating hides its own tail. One San Francisco vendor holds a 4.4 average across 272 ratings, which sounds solid until you open the breakdown and find 31 one-star reviews inside it. Another holds 5.0 across 21 with nothing below five stars at all.

Open the rating breakdown on the Google profile and count everything below four stars. That number, not the average, tells you whether anyone walked away unhappy. A small clean record and a large mixed one are different risks, and the average flattens both into the same figure.

Judge review count against the category, not the market

Review volume varies enormously by how often a service is bought. Conference AV is a low-frequency purchase and even well-established vendors accumulate reviews slowly. A specialist with 20 reviews in a narrow category is not behind a generalist with 100 in a broad one.

The useful comparison is against the other vendors you are actually considering for the same job. Compared across categories, review count mostly measures how often the service gets bought.

It is also worth knowing that review count does not predict where Google ranks a vendor. In San Francisco on 2026-08-01, a vendor with no reviews held a top-three local position for hybrid event production, and a vendor with 21 reviews outranked one with 52 for conference AV.

Read the itemised service list, not the homepage copy

Most vendor homepages claim full-service capability. The itemised services block on a Google Business Profile is more useful, because each entry is a specific thing the vendor has chosen to name and describe.

Look for the specific thing you need, named. "Full-service AV" on a homepage and "trade show AV planning" as a listed service with a description are different levels of commitment. Count the entries too: a vendor publishing 48 itemised services has documented more of its operation than one publishing 31, and far more than one publishing none.

See whether they will put a number in public

Almost no AV vendor publishes pricing. That makes it a genuine differentiator rather than a formality.

A published starting price does not tell you what your event will cost, and you should not treat it as a quote. It tells you the vendor is willing to anchor a range before you are on a sales call, which correlates with how the rest of the pricing conversation tends to go.

Confirm the operational basics

Five things, all visible on a Google profile in under a minute:

Is the profile claimed by the owner. Is there a street address rather than a service area alone. Is the on-site services attribute set, meaning they come to you. Are there enough photos to show real inventory rather than stock images. Are they registered under enough categories to cover the work you are asking for.

None of these is decisive alone. Together they separate an operating business from a listing.

Two things worth checking that we cannot score

Published hours against your load-in. One San Francisco vendor publishes Monday to Friday, 09:00 to 17:30, with no weekend hours shown. If your conference loads in on a Sunday, ask. Published hours and crew availability are not the same thing, and the answer is usually fine, but the question is free.

Whether they own the gear or broker it. Brokered inventory is not automatically worse, and plenty of good vendors sub-hire at peaks. But it changes who is accountable when a panel fails at 6am, and it is not something either the profile or the website reliably tells you. Ask directly.

The order to do this in

Start with the distribution, because it is the fastest disqualifier. Then the service list, because it tells you whether they do your specific job at all. Then the operational checks. Leave price last: it is the least informative of the five and the one most likely to anchor you on the wrong thing.

Where we apply this

• The full rubric, with the arithmetic
• All San Francisco rankings