As ICO marketing grew, and the number of projects increased, the market started looking for better ways to evaluate projects. A number of companies sprang up to offer impartial reviews of ICO projects. Self-described experts rate projects on different scales to recommend how good a project is for technical and investment success. However, many projects have taken to paying reviewers or at least offering to pay, in order to get a higher rating.

While there are a large number of ICO rating sites, the two best known are currently ICOBench and ICORating. Many projects work hard to get a high score on these sites so that they can feature this rating in their marketing materials. Whether or not these ratings are accurate or not is still being worked out and will change. However, every marker of trust an ICO can get surely helps so many projects work hard (fairly or unfairly) to get good ratings.