Rethinking Verbalized Confidence for LLM-as-a-Judge: A Compatibility Shift on Post-2025 Proprietary Models

Verbalized confidence, long dismissed as overconfident, coarse, and prone to round-number clustering, is now the more robust soft-scoring mechanism for LLM-as-a-Judge on top-tier proprietary models. Across SummEval, AggreFact, and HelpSteer2, spanning up to 18 LLMs, we show that the standard advice to prefer log-probabilities no longer holds on post-2025 models, where verbalized confidence is the better signal. We call this a compatibility shift. On top of a standard verbalized-confidence baseline, we introduce two new ingredients: an overconfidence advisory and self-debate. Together they improve calibration, score-distribution spread, and robustness to task subjectivity. We further observe a generation effect: post-2025 models accommodate these two additions with little balanced-accuracy cost, whereas pre-2025 models pay a measurable penalty. Compared with logprob-based G-Eval, verbalized confidence is the more subjectivity-robust soft signal on GPT-family top-tier releases. The shift is invisible under accuracy-only reporting. Rather than defaulting to hard predictions, we recommend broader use of soft scoring in LLM-as-a-Judge. More broadly, verbalized confidence has moved from a weaker substitute for logprobs to a practical soft-scoring mechanism for contemporary LLM judges.