How this research is produced, sourced and disclosed.

What the institute is

The Franchise Research Institute is a research masthead publishing dated, sourced franchise research. It is published by 20percent.ai and funded by Choose Franchise.

It is a disclosed research arm, not an independent observer. That relationship is stated on every page of this site, and no page should be read as independent commentary.

The institute is global in ambition and starts with Australia. Other countries are structured as country sections of the same masthead rather than separate sites.

Data sources

Franchise structure and financial figures come from the Australian franchise disclosure register, obtained through the Choose Franchise research API. The register is never copied; figures are queried, aggregated and reported with their source.

Business identifiers are Choose Franchise system slugs and IDs. Google Place IDs are not used anywhere in our data model.

Customer rating figures come from Google review snapshots supplied through Data Hub. Reviews are used as rating arithmetic only; we do not draw sentiment claims from the text of sampled reviews.

Values below $1,000 or above $25,000,000 are treated as register data-entry artefacts and excluded (see Choose Franchise methodology).

Windows, denominators and refresh cadence

Every figure published on this site carries its window: a financial year for disclosure-based figures, a snapshot date for unit and review counts, or a stated span for changes over time.

Every figure also carries its denominator: how many systems or locations contributed to it. Figures resting on fewer than ten contributing systems are marked indicative and are never used for headline benchmarks.

Register watch is refreshed monthly. Quarterly reports use rolling 90-day windows. Annual reports follow the disclosure document cycle after financial years end on 30 June.

Confidence rules for momentum claims

A direction or momentum claim, such as a rating moving up or down, is only made where the Data Hub confidence rules are met: a span of 60 days or more, a rating move of 0.1 or more, and 20 or more new reviews within the span.

Where those rules are not met, the figure is published without a direction. No exceptions are made for compelling-looking short moves.

AI tooling

AI tooling is used in analysis and drafting. It is named openly in method descriptions rather than hidden.

Every published figure traces to a query against the data sources above. AI does not generate figures, and editorial review checks each report's figures, windows and denominators against source queries before publication.

Corrections

Errors are corrected in place with the correction dated in the report's last-updated field. If you believe a figure is wrong, contact us through the contact page.