How we score availability
The 1-5 star rating you see in Google search results next to refurbmonitor product pages is an objective scarcity score, not a user review. It measures how quickly each Apple Certified Refurbished product typically sells out, based on real-time monitoring of Apple's Refurbished Store.
The 5 buckets
Minimum sample size
We require at least 3 closed in-stock windows (i.e. 3 separate times the product appeared in stock and then sold out) before publishing a score. Sparse-data products get no rating at all — they are not labelled 'Slow' just because we haven't seen them yet.
It is not a user review
A 5-star score does NOT mean the product is good. It means the product is scarce or in high demand. A 1-star score does NOT mean the product is bad — it means the product is generally easy to find. Apple Certified Refurbished products carry the same 1-year warranty, return policy and condition guarantee regardless of how fast they sell.
Data source
Refurbmonitor's worker polls every Apple Refurbished Store every few minutes and records each transition between 'in stock' and 'out of stock'. The median in-stock window duration over the product's full tracked history drives the bucket. The flicker-smoothing threshold is published in the codebase (STOCK_FLICKER_THRESHOLD_MIN).
Why we publish the methodology
Google's structured-data team can manual-action sites that ship aggregateRating without a reproducible basis. Documenting the formula here is how we keep the rating defensible — anyone can audit our data, reproduce the bucket, and verify the score reflects measurable reality, not editorial opinion.