How reviews work

This page explains, in plain words, how reviews get onto CandorRated, how we check them, how the Candor Score is calculated and what businesses can and cannot do.

1. Who can write a review

• Anyone with an account and a confirmed email address.
• About a genuine experience in the last 12 months — you pick the date of the experience when you write.
• One review per business per person. You can edit or delete your own review at any time; earlier versions are kept for our moderators.

2. How reviews are checked

Every review goes through automatic checks before it is published. A review that trips one of them is held for a person on our team, who approves or rejects it. The checks look for:

• links, email addresses or phone numbers in the text;
• words on our blocked list (spam, abuse);
• text copied from another review;
• several reviews of the same business from the same network in a short time;
• a review written from an email address at the business itself (self-reviews are rejected);
• brand-new accounts giving 1★ or 5★;
• a sudden burst of reviews for one business (our team is alerted);
• very short, all-capitals or meaningless text.

If your review is rejected we email you the reason.

What we don't check: we do not verify purchases, so we cannot confirm that a reviewer bought from the company — our checks look for spam and fake-review patterns, not receipts.

3. How the Candor Score is calculated

The Candor Score runs from 1 to 5. It is not a plain average:

• Recent experiences count most. Reviews of experiences in the last 12 months count fully, 12–24 months ago count three-quarters, and older ones count half.
• Every company starts near the middle. The score behaves as if each company already had 5 neutral reviews of 3.5★. With few reviews the score stays close to 3.5; as real reviews add up, they take over. This stops one or two reviews from deciding a company's position.
• Only published reviews count. The star breakdown on each page shows the plain count of each rating, so you can always see the raw numbers too.

4. What businesses can and cannot do

• They can claim their page for free, keep their details correct, reply publicly to any review and report a review that breaks our guidelines.
• They cannot delete, edit or hide reviews, and they cannot pay to change their Candor Score or the order of reviews.
• They can invite their customers with a personal link. Reviews written through it are labelled Invited, follow the same rules and count the same as every other review. Companies must invite all customers, not only happy ones, and may never offer anything in return.
• They can buy a sponsored placement: a spot labelled Sponsored above category and search results. It is kept apart from the ranked list and never changes the Candor Score or any review. How we make money.

5. When a business reports a review

The review stays visible while we look at it. If the business says the reviewer was never a customer, we ask the reviewer to send proof of the experience (for example an order confirmation, with personal details hidden). Only our moderators see that proof. If the reviewer does not answer within 7 days, a moderator decides with the information we have. The review is never removed just because the reviewer did not reply, and both sides are told the outcome.

6. Our promise

We never remove or change a review because a business paid for it or asked for it. Reviews are only removed when they break our review guidelines or the law.

7. The trust check on company pages

Besides reviews, each company page lists facts we could confirm about who runs the website, each with its source:

• Domain age — from the public domain registry.
• Secure connection — a live check of the website's HTTPS certificate.
• Registered company — from the official company register, where we can match one (for example Companies House in the UK).
• Address, phone, policies, support pages and social profiles — read from the company's homepage and its contact and about pages. We don't check other pages, so if something isn't there we show it in grey as "not checked", never as missing.
• Encyclopedia entry and website popularity — from Wikidata and the Tranco list of the world's most-visited websites. Popularity counts as a confirmed fact only for the 50,000 most-visited websites; a lower rank is shown in grey.

We show how many facts we could confirm — never a pass or fail score, and never a verdict. A missing fact usually means our automatic check couldn't reach it (many websites block automated visits), not that something is wrong. Companies can correct their details by claiming their page, and anyone can tell us about a mistake.