How our numbers work

The dots next to “What parents actually say” tell you how much evidence the summary rests on — nothing more. They are a count of detailed reviews, not a measure of quality. A brand-new show with two glowing reviews shows one dot; that is about our certainty, not the show.

• Low1–4 detailed reviews
• Medium5–19 detailed reviews
• High20 or more detailed reviews

“Detailed” means a review of at least 18 words. Most reviews on a popular kids show are a few words of praise, which tell you nothing about what the show is like, so they don't feed the summaries. They still count towards the star rating and the review total.

The grade is a plain translation of the star rating into a letter, with one adjustment for thin evidence. It is not a separate opinion of ours.

The adjustment: with fewer than 10 ratings we won't award an A or A+, capping it at A-. With fewer than 4 ratings we drop the plus entirely. A perfect score from two people isn't an A+; it's two people.

We read the detailed reviews and count how often parents raise a topic in their own words. If forty reviews mention bedtime, the bedtime row reads “mentioned in 40 reviews”. We show you a real sentence behind each row so you can check our reading.

Why counts and not percentages: nobody mentions everything in a review. A topic raised by 43% of reviewers is a strong signal, but “43%” reads like a mark out of 100 and looks like a failure. So we show how many people said it, and let the bars carry the comparison.

What the bars mean: each bar is relative to the most-mentioned topic in that box, which is flagged Top. A full bar means “this came up more than anything else here” — it never means 100%.

A topic needs at least 2 mentions and 2% of detailed reviews before we show it, so one stray sentence never reads as a pattern.

These summaries describe what reviewers said. They are not our verdict on the show, and we don't write reviews ourselves.

Yoto is a screen-free audio player for kids, and some podcasts here have a Yoto card. Where we could confirm one, the show page links straight to it.

Yoto publishes no catalogue, so we establish this two ways. Some shows have a Yoto card we can look up directly, and those link straight to it. Others are carried in the Yoto app's podcast section with no card page at all — for those we rely on Yoto's own podcast community, where a post says the show is available in the app.

We deliberately exclude posts that simply share a show's RSS feed so you can build your own card. That's true of every podcast ever made and would tell you nothing. Of 49 shows mentioned in that community, 33 actually said they were available; the rest we left unflagged.

As ever, absence proves nothing: a show without a Yoto flag may still be on Yoto. We only add these, never claim unavailability. And we don't say whether a card is free or paid, because the public data doesn't tell us.

Badges are computed from the whole catalogue every time we rebuild the site. Only one is chosen by hand, and it says so.

• ⭐Featured pick

  Our editorial pick of the month. The only badge here we choose by hand.

• 👋Staff pick

  On our hand-picked "where to start" list. Chosen by us, not computed — these are the shows we would hand a parent who is new to this.

• 🏆Top rated

  Rated 4.7 stars or better from at least 500 ratings. A fixed bar, not a top-ten slot — some months more shows clear it, some months fewer.

• 💬Most reviewed

  At least 400 written parent reviews. These are the shows with the deepest body of first-hand experience behind them.

• 🍿Binge-worthy

  Rated 4.6 or better AND 300+ episodes. Episode count alone says nothing — plenty of shows are long and mediocre — so this is the two together: worth getting into, with somewhere to go.

• 💎Hidden gem

  Rated 4.75 or better from between 20 and 350 ratings, with at least 15 written reviews — adored by the people who found it, but nowhere near a chart. Kept rare on purpose.

Why “hidden gem” exists: the loudest shows aren't always the best ones. A show with 300 ratings at 4.8 is beloved by everyone who found it, but it will never outrank a chart show on review volume alone. This badge is how those surface.

Each collection gives one award — Best for Car Rides, Best at Bedtime, Funniest Show and so on. They go to the show whose reviews point most strongly at that theme, weighted by overall quality, so a well-rated generalist can't sweep every category it happens to qualify for.

To be eligible a show needs at least 4.4 stars and 15 written reviews, and no show can hold more than one award — so twelve different shows are recognised rather than one winning everything.

Awards are recalculated whenever we refresh the data. They reflect who leads today, not a permanent title, and nobody can buy one.

Sorting by raw average would put a 5.0 from three ratings above a 4.7 from twelve thousand. So we pull every show towards the middle in proportion to how little evidence it has, then sort on the result.

score = (50 × 4.3 + ratings × average) ÷ (50 + ratings)

In plain terms: we treat every show as if it already had 50 ratings of 4.3 before we start counting the real ones. A show with thousands of ratings barely moves; a show with five moves a lot. Sorting by “Highest rated” instead gives you the raw average, unadjusted.

Where a show states an age range, we use it. Most don't — so where parents name their kids' ages in reviews, we derive a range from those mentions and label it “from reviews” on the page. We need at least three reviews naming an age before we'll estimate, and shows with neither are left blank rather than guessed at.

An age filter only matches shows that actually state or imply a range. We'd rather leave a show out than claim it suits every age.

A show appears in a collection either because we placed it there by hand, or because enough parent reviews independently point that way — for instance, a show joins Bedtime when at least 12% of its detailed reviews mention bedtime. The thresholds differ per collection and we tune them by hand when a collection gets too broad to be useful.

This is the softest thing on the site. Treat collections as a good starting point, not a definitive list.

The paragraph at the top of every show page is the publisher's own description, taken from the show's RSS feed and trimmed to the first couple of sentences. It's labelled From the publisher so you always know whose words you're reading, and the full version appears further down the page.

Where we've written our own line about a show, it appears separately under Why we recommend it. We used to blend the two, which made our copy look like the publisher's — that was misleading and we fixed it.

Reviews are always quoted verbatim with their author and a link back to where they were written. We never rewrite a review.