Everything below is what actually happens, not what we would like to happen. Where money is involved it says so.
Every company, brand, product, review and owner reply is submitted unpublished and stays that way until an administrator approves it.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We do not publish a listing and moderate it afterwards.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.
An administrator confirmed that 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.
A listing with no Verified badge has not failed a check. In most cases nobody has asked for one.
Two things on this site are commercial, and both are labelled where they appear.
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.
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.
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.
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 A wrong phone number, a business that has closed, a review that is not from a real client, a specification that is out of date — all of it is worth reporting, and it is the fastest way to fix a page.