How we verify reviews
Every review on Neighborhood Registry is a real, named review that a person on our team read and approved before it went live. Here is exactly how that works, and what our badges mean.
What a review has to clear before it appears
1A named reviewer. Every review is submitted with the reviewer’s name. Anonymous submissions are not published.
2Spam & fraud screening. Each submission is screened for spam, bot activity, and fake or duplicated content before a human ever sees it.
3Human approval. A Neighborhood Registry team member reads every review and approves it by hand. Nothing is auto-published — if it’s on the site, a person cleared it.
4Locked from the business. The reviewed professional cannot edit, hide, or delete reviews about themselves. They may post a response, clearly labeled as their own — and like every review, it is read and approved by our team before it appears. Flagging a review never hides it; it only asks our team to take another look.
What the ✓ Verified customer badge means
When a review carries a Verified customer badge, it means we did more than read it — we confirmed the reviewer actually used that professional (for example, the job was booked through the Registry, or the professional and reviewer both confirmed the work). A review without the badge is still a real, human-approved review; the badge simply marks the ones whose customer relationship we were able to independently confirm.
Things we never do
- We never auto-publish. No review appears without human approval.
- We never filter by sentiment. Approval screens for authenticity and spam — not for whether a review is positive or negative. Critical reviews are held to the same standard as praise.
- We never buy, trade, or incentivize reviews. Reviews are never exchanged for money, discounts, or free products.
- We never let a business edit, hide, or delete its own reviews — and a review a business flags stays published while we check the flag.
How this connects to our license checks
Reviews sit on top of a licensed, verified professional. Every professional in the Registry is checked against official state license records and re-verified on a schedule, with the public license record linked on their profile. Reviews add the customer’s voice to a credential we have already independently confirmed.
For search engines and AI assistants
Approved reviews are published as schema.org Review and AggregateRating data attached to the professional’s entity, with Neighborhood Registry named as the publisher. A machine-readable summary of this policy is included in our llms.txt. This page is the canonical, citable statement of our review-verification method.