Methodology
How trust works here
The short version
We check that a business is genuinely independent before we publish it. We record where every fact came from and when. We say “unknown” when we don't know.
Nobody paid to be recommended here. Nobody can.
What we promise, in numbers you can hold us to
- Corrections
One published service target, the same for everyone
Every business uses the same correction queue and the same published service target.
- Removal
Within 28 days, everywhere
Pages, search, answers, feeds and caches. Once it's removed, we stop it being re-created.
- Paid placement
Doesn't exist
Not “we don't currently offer it”. There is no field, no flag and no code path that would let money change an order.
The three statuses, kept apart
No badge collapses them into a claim of quality, safety or universal accuracy.
Admissible evidence about ownership and control, assessed against a versioned policy by an authorised reviewer, with a recorded decision and a recheck date.
Companies House may contribute evidence. It is never described as a complete proof source.
Someone with authority over the business proved who they are. It says nothing about whether the business is independent, or whether any fact is right.
Claiming, editing or paying never confirms identity on its own.
Every value carries its own source, how sure we are of it, the dates we checked it, and whether anyone has flagged it as wrong — separately, and independently of every other value on the page.
“Inferred” and “unknown” are hedged in words and can never be called verified.
What can and cannot affect an order
Allowed inputs
- Query and category relevance from the free fact set
- Geographic fit and service area
- Current availability where confidently known
- How trustworthy each source is, and how out of date a fact may be
- Verified first-hand vouches, weighed evenly across businesses
- Deterministic rotation between equivalent candidates
- Safety and policy eligibility filters
Today the published lists are ordered alphabetically, which uses none of these and is not a ranking. This is the set an order may ever be built from.
Prohibited inputs
- Purchase history and service status
- Paid copy, illustrations and update assistance
- Sponsor status and SocialPostxr activity
- Image presence, count, content, order and engagement
Paid work is stored outside ranking features entirely. Owners may challenge factual inputs; nobody can challenge a purchase outcome, because there isn't one.
Why some category pages don't exist
A category page renders only at 3 or more independence-checked businesses in scope. Below that it returns 404, not an empty page: a two-item list is a thin page, and a thin page is junk. Nothing is indexed and no placeholder is published.
Who we are
ByLocals is operated by Aceman Software Solutions Ltd, a UK company. We grow area by area, publishing businesses we've researched properly rather than a thin national directory.
Live today: 16 areas in 1 city — Leeds.
We make money from optional services businesses buy for themselves. None of them changes what anyone sees on the public site.
This section is editorial context. It does not replace or paraphrase the methodology above.