Editorial policy

This site earns money from businesses it also assesses. That is a real conflict, and the only useful response is to be specific about how it’s contained.

Scores cannot be bought

Commercial records and scoring records are kept separate in our database, and the query that ranks businesses does not read the commercial data at all. This is a structural separation, not a promise about our intentions, the ranking code has no access to who’s paying.

Sponsored placements appear after our editorial picks and are labelled as paid. A business that sponsors a category gains visibility in that labelled position and nothing else.

Suppression is audited too

Declining to recommend a business is also a decision that can harm it, and unlike a low score it’s invisible. Every exclusion is recorded along with the evidence that produced it, including how confident the underlying match was. Where an excluded business is also a paying customer, the exclusion stands and is flagged for human review, commercial status never reverses it.

Corrections

If information about your business is wrong, email us and we will check it against the original source. Where the error is ours, we fix it and the corrected assessment goes live at the next update. Where the source itself is wrong, say a public register, we will say so and record your position alongside the entry.

You can ask what information we hold about you and request that it be corrected, under the Privacy Act 2020. If we decline a correction, we attach a statement of the correction you sought and it travels with the record.

How quickly. We aim to acknowledge a correction within five working days. A factual fix is applied at the next rebuild rather than waiting for a cycle: a wrong name, a wrong licence class, a business listed in the wrong town. A disputed assessment takes longer, because it means re-reading the source, and we will tell you where it has got to rather than leaving it silent.

If you disagree with a score

A score is not an opinion we will defend for its own sake. It is arithmetic over public inputs, and every input is named on the methodology page. If you think the score is wrong, the useful question is which input is wrong: the licence record, the registration date, or the review figures.

We will not remove a business from a ranking because it dislikes its position, and we will not raise a score because a business asks. Both would make every other score meaningless.

What we never publish

Disciplinary findings are never attached to a business. Those findings concern named people. A link between a person and a company does not establish that the conduct happened there, or that they worked there at the time, and publishing it as if it did would be a claim we cannot support about a business that may have had nothing to do with it.

We do not publish review text. The rating and the number of reviews are facts about a business; the words belong to the people who wrote them.

Right of reply

Claiming your profile is free and does not require a purchase. A claimed profile lets you correct your details, add services and respond publicly.

Where our data comes from

• Public licence and registration registers operated by New Zealand regulatory bodies.
• The New Zealand Business Number register, for company registration dates and legal names.
• Google, for the rating and the number of reviews. We read those figures by more than one route because no single route covers every business, and the figures are Google’s either way. Our methodology page sets out how the two were compared.
• Businesses’ own websites and claimed profiles.

We do not use contact details published on regulatory registers for marketing. Those addresses are published so the public can verify a licence, and using them to sell things would be a misuse of that.

What we collect about you

We count how many times each page is viewed. That is the whole of it: no cookies, no advertising identifiers, and nothing that follows you to another site. There is no consent banner because there is nothing to consent to.

We tell a business how many times its own listing was viewed. That figure is a count of pages, never a list of people, and we could not produce one if we wanted to.