Metacritic.com is a website that aggregates reviews of music albums, games, movies, TV shows and DVDs. For each product, a numerical score from each review is obtained and the total is averaged. An excerpt of each review is provided along with a hyperlink to the source. Three colour codes of Green, Yellow and Red summarize the critic's recommendation. This gives an idea of the general appeal of the product among reviewers and, to a lesser extent, the public.

The site is somewhat similar to Rotten Tomatoes, but the scoring results sometimes differ very drastically, due to Metacritic's method of scoring that converts each review into a percentage before taking a weighted average and listing different numbers of reviews.

Many review websites give a review grade out of five, out of ten, out of a hundred, or even an alphabetical score. Metacritic converts such a grade into a percentage. For reviews with no explicit scores (for example, Amazon.com's editorial reviews), Metacritic manually assesses the tone of the review before assigning a relevant grade. Weighting is also applied to reviews—those from major periodicals may have a greater effect on the average than niche ones, although Metacritic refuses to reveal what weights are applied to which publications.