How listings and reviews are moderated

Nothing goes live on its own

Every company, brand, product, review and owner reply is submitted unpublished and stays that way until an administrator approves it. That applies to the first version and to every later one: editing an approved listing returns it to the queue, so a page cannot be changed into something different after it was checked.

We do not publish a listing and moderate it afterwards. The trade is that approval takes time; the benefit is that nothing reaches a reader unread.

The queue is worked oldest first, and a paid plan moves an account's submissions to the front of it. That decides when something is read, never how it is judged — the standard is the same whether a company pays or not. What a plan costs.

What Verified means

The listing belongs to the business it names, and the date of that check is recorded. It is a statement about identity and nothing else. It is not a rating, not a recommendation, and not a judgement about the quality of anyone’s work.

There are two ways it is granted. An administrator can confirm a listing by hand. Or a company can publish our badge on its own website, at its own domain, and we read it back — controlling the domain a business trades under is a statement about identity, which is what this badge is. It cannot be bought either way.

A listing with no Verified badge has not failed a check. In most cases nobody has asked for one.

What is paid for

Three things on this site are commercial. Two of them are labelled wherever they appear; the third changes nothing a reader sees.

Paid placement

A company can pay to be lifted above the standard ordering on listing and category pages. Wherever that happens the badge says Sponsored, and it links here. Paid placement buys position. It does not buy a Verified badge, it does not change a rating, and it cannot remove a review.

Queue position

A paid plan moves an account's submissions to the front of the moderation queue, so they are read sooner. It changes when a submission is read and nothing else. The same person applies the same standard to it, a paid listing is refused for exactly the reasons a free one is, and nothing about queue position appears on any page a reader sees.

Advertising

Pages carry Google advertising, capped at three units per page. Those units are chosen by Google, not by us, and nothing an advertiser does affects where a company appears.

Featured is not the same as Sponsored, and is never paid for. A company that publishes our badge on its own website earns a lift on the categories it appears in, and those listings are labelled Featured. No money changes hands in either direction: they give us a link on their site and we give them position on ours. Anybody can check it — the badge is on the company’s own home page, in public. A paid placement always sorts above an earned one.

Everything else — listing a company, being reviewed, appearing in a category, ranking on Top rated — is free and cannot be bought. The leaderboards state their own ranking rule on the page.

Reviews

A review needs an account with a confirmed email address, and it is read by an administrator before it appears. One review per person per company. The company being reviewed can reply once, publicly, and that reply is moderated too.

We do not remove reviews on request. Not for the company, and not for a payment. A review comes down only if it breaks a rule — it is not about a real engagement, it names a private individual, it discloses something confidential, or it is abusive. A company that believes a review is fabricated can tell us, with reasons, and an administrator decides.

Ratings shown on a profile are recalculated from the published reviews. Nobody types one in.

Listings we wrote ourselves

Some profiles were written by our editors from published sources rather than submitted by the company, so that the directory is useful before it is complete. Those pages carry the same approval process and the same date stamps as any other. Any company can take over its own listing, free, and correct anything we got wrong.

If something here is wrong

Tell us. A wrong phone number, a business that has closed, a review that is not from a real client, a specification that is out of date — all of it is worth reporting, and it is the fastest way to fix a page.