Reviews come from businesses that sign in with a real email address and have been a customer of the provider. A person reads every review before it goes live.
Anyone signed in, once, per provider. Provider users cannot review anything, including a competitor: an account that manages a listing loses the ability to review entirely, so there is no "reviewing a competitor" edge case to police. Sign-in is a magic link sent to your email; there is no password and we never publish your address.
A person may hold one review per provider. Editing a published review takes it back to pending until it is re-approved; the previous version stays visible until then. Withdrawing a review takes it down; posting a new one after that starts the process again.
Reviews are not anonymous to us, only to other readers. Every review is tied to a real account that signed in by email. Before a review is published we check the account's email domain against the provider's own domain and against any competitor in the same area, look at how many reviews the same person or company has posted and how recently, and check for open flags on the reviewer. Anything that looks like it comes from the provider, a competitor, or a burst of coordinated activity is held for closer review or rejected.
Every review is read before it appears. A rejected review is given one of these reasons, and no others: off-topic, not a customer, abusive, duplicate, incentivised, provider employee, spam. A review can also be hidden after publication, for the same reasons or because a complaint under the process below was upheld.
A provider who has claimed a listing may post one response to each published review, under the company's name. A response cannot edit, hide or remove the review it replies to.
A provider may ask a customer to leave a review and may link them to the listing to do it. A provider may not offer anything of value, a discount, credit, gift or anything else, in exchange for a review, for a particular rating, or for changing or removing one. A review written in exchange for anything of value is rejected as incentivised, and repeated attempts are reported to the provider's account.
The Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act 2024 makes it a breach of consumer protection law to publish or commission a fake review, or to host reviews without taking reasonable steps to prevent and remove them. The eligibility, moderation and incentive rules on this page are how we meet that duty: a real account behind every review, a person checking every submission, a fixed and public list of rejection reasons, and a route to complain about one.
A member or a provider can flag a review they believe breaks these rules from the review itself. If you believe a review is defamatory, that is a separate, statutory process: see how to complain about a review.