Verifying a website is a small problem. The thing you are checking is the thing you are looking at, and if it responds and still describes the business we described, most of the work is done.
Verifying a place is a different problem, because the evidence that would settle it fastest is often the exact thing we have promised never to publish. A great many small businesses are run from the room somebody sleeps above. The address that would prove the business exists is also the address of a family, and no amount of verification value is worth handing that to strangers.
So the procedure below is shaped around a subtraction. It is what is left once the easiest evidence is off the table permanently.
Scope. This piece does not state what any law requires of anyone, and it does not tell you whether the arrangements described here would satisfy an obligation of yours. Both of those turn on a jurisdiction and a set of circumstances, we are not qualified in any jurisdiction, and that is a standing boundary rather than a gap. What it describes is our own conduct — what we check, what we hold, what we publish and what we refuse — which we can state plainly because it is a fact about us, and for anything with a legal consequence attached the sources are the body that supervises the question where you are, and an adviser qualified there.
What this is, and who it is for
Two readers.
The first is deciding whether to act on something they found here — to travel somewhere, to order something, to hire someone with a workshop. That reader wants to know what our check actually establishes, so they can judge how much weight it will carry.
The second runs a shop, a studio or a workshop and is trying to work out what appearing here would expose. That reader deserves the whole procedure in advance rather than a summary after the fact.
This is the procedure in full, including the outcomes where the honest result is that we do not list the business at all.
The rule that never bends
We never publish a residential address.
Not when a home is the registered address of the business. Not when it is the trading address. Not when publishing it would make our verification faster, cheaper or more convincing. Not when the operator has already published it somewhere else. Not when the operator asks us to.
The same applies to personal mobile numbers, personal email addresses, and the names of family members or staff.
The last two conditions are the ones that get argued about, so they are worth stating separately.
"But it is already public." Republishing something moves it. A detail sitting in one place, findable by someone who already knows to look, is a different exposure from the same detail sitting in a browsable, machine-readable register that is designed to put businesses in front of people who were not looking for them. We would be adding reach, and reach is the harmful part.
"But I want it shown." Consent given today covers the person giving it today. It does not cover the people who also live there, it does not cover the business being sold, and it does not cover the operator in two years when circumstances have changed and the record has been copied into places neither of us controls. The preference is temporary. The exposure is not. So the answer is the same either way, and we would rather be inconvenient than reversible only in theory.
This sits on what we refuse to publish permanently. It is not a launch-phase caution.
What we are actually trying to establish about a physical business
One thing, in the same narrow form as every other check on this site: that on a stated date, this business was reachable and recognisably the business we described.
For a physical business that resolves into four questions.
- Does a real trading operation exist under this name?
- Can an ordinary member of the public actually reach it — by visiting, by ordering, by booking, by phoning a business line?
- Is the description we hold still true of it?
- Is any detail we intend to publish something we have confirmed on a date, rather than something we found lying around?
That is the whole claim. It is not an assessment, and the narrowness is deliberate. A check that tried to establish more would be a check we could not perform, and the date next to it would be decorating a guess. The same reasoning is set out at our method.
What we check, in order
The sequence below is the physical addition to the general check procedure. The online steps still apply where there is anything online to check.
| Step | What is established | Who does it |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | A trading route exists that a stranger could use today: a shop that is open to the public, an order route, a booking route, or a business phone line. | Person |
| 2 | The business, as it presents itself, matches the entry we hold. | Person |
| 3 | Any published detail we intend to repeat is confirmed on this date and traceable to how it was confirmed. | Person |
| 4 | Nothing we would publish is a residential detail, a personal contact, or somebody's name who did not choose to be there. | Person |
| 5 | Where the register would carry a location, it is a location the public is invited to attend. | Person |
| 6 | Where a question can only be settled by somebody standing there, that is a physical visit, and the record says so. | Person |
Step 4 is a stop, not a note. If a step-4 problem cannot be resolved, the sequence ends and no entry is published, regardless of how well steps 1 to 3 went.
Step 6 is worth being precise about because it is the step most often overstated by listing sites. A desk check is a desk check. If nobody went, the record does not say anybody went.
What we do when the only address is a home
This is the ordinary case, not the exception. A large share of independent businesses have no premises the public can attend.
The short version: we stop trying to establish a location, and establish the business by other routes instead.
That means the location question is dropped rather than answered carefully. We are not looking for a way to describe where the business is without quite saying it. A near-miss is still a locator, and a register that publishes near-misses about home-run businesses has simply chosen a slower method of doing the harm.
What we use instead:
- A trading route that a stranger can use. An order form, a booking route, a business phone line, a market stall the operator has publicly announced, a counter inside somebody else's premises where the operator trades by arrangement.
- A dated confirmation from the operator, held as correspondence, never rendered.
- Whatever the operator has themselves chosen to publish about how you reach them, quoted and attributed with a capture date rather than restated as our finding.
And what the entry then says about location is one of a small number of plain forms: that the business trades online, that it trades by appointment, that it trades at markets or events the operator announces, or that the location is not published. Where a field would otherwise be filled, it is null, and the entry says so rather than leaving a reader to assume the blank means something.
This costs us something real. A home-run business verified this way carries less evidence than a shop with a door. We would rather publish the weaker record and say it is weaker.
What we publish, and what we hold and never publish
These are two different sets, and the difference is most of the point of this piece.
Published on a physical entry
- What the business is, in our own words.
- What a customer can actually do there.
- A public trading location, only where the public is invited to attend it.
- Business contact routes that the operator publishes as business contact routes.
- The date of the last check, the result, the method version and the named reviewer.
- An attributed quote with a capture date, if the operator gave us one.
Held internally and never rendered
- Correspondence with the operator, including anything they told us to help a check.
- The check-log rows behind each date.
- A note that a removal or a never-list-again request was made, because honouring it requires remembering it.
Never held at all
- A residential address, in any field, in any form, including a partial one.
- Personal mobile numbers and personal email addresses, where a business route exists.
- Names of family or staff.
The retention position on the internal set is the minimum needed to do the job and nothing more: it is not exported, not licensed, not sold, and not available as a lead list, which is a prohibition that binds machine consumers as well as us. On a removal request it comes out, and what survives is the bare note described at request removal. The wider position is at our privacy policy.
One thing we are not going to do on this page is tell you what the law requires here. Whether a sole trader's business contact details are treated as personal data, and how long anything may be held, are questions whose answers turn on the jurisdiction and on the circumstances of the particular person, and they are answered by the body that supervises data protection where that person is rather than by a register that publishes about businesses.
What we can state is the position we have chosen for ourselves, which is the one described above: hold the minimum the job needs, render less than we hold, export none of the internal set, and release it on request without argument. We apply that whatever the answer turns out to be anywhere, because it is a floor we set rather than a reading of anybody's rules.
The cases where we decline to list at all
Declining is a normal outcome of this procedure. It is not a failure of the procedure and it is not a finding about the business.
We decline when:
- The only way to establish that the business exists would involve publishing something from the never list.
- The business cannot be reached by any route a stranger could use, so there is nothing for a reader to act on.
- The description cannot be written from anything we confirmed, so it would have to be assembled from the operator's marketing copy presented as ours.
- The operator wants a detail published that we do not publish, and there is no version of the entry that works without it.
- A check would require a physical visit that we cannot make, and the entry would be materially unsupported without one.
A decline is recorded as a pattern in the refusal file, anonymised, never naming the business. It is not an accusation, it is not a judgement, and it carries no implication whatsoever about the business. It means we could not build a record we would be willing to stand behind, which is a fact about us.
Any operator who is declined can ask what the obstacle was, and can come back through submit a business if it changes.
How an owner can change or remove any of it
Free, fast, no reason required, and no attempt to talk you out of it.
- Something is wrong. Corrections. The change is made and logged in public with a date.
- Take it down. Request removal. The entry comes off the site and out of the machine-readable export. Nothing sits in its place.
- Take down something specific. Ask for exactly that. Partial removals are handled the same way as full ones.
- We published something we should not have. It comes down first, and any discussion about whether we agree happens afterwards. That order is not negotiable.
- Never list me again. Recorded and honoured.
The full list of what we will never publish, with the harm each rule prevents, is at what we will never publish about you. If the confusion is about which of your addresses is which, which address is which covers the terminology and is explicit about which parts depend on your own jurisdiction.
What this procedure cannot establish
Being direct about this is more useful than any assurance we could offer.
- Not quality. Nothing in this procedure examines whether the work is good.
- Not safety. We do not inspect premises, equipment, food handling or anything else.
- Not solvency. We have no visibility of anyone's finances and would not publish it if we did.
- Not licensing, insurance or professional registration. Where a business requires a licence we cannot verify, it is outside the entry bar entirely.
- Not that anywhere is open right now. We check on a cadence, never continuously. A date is not a live status, which is the whole subject of the seasonal closure problem.
- Not that a business still exists today. A check ages, and a check on a place ages faster than a check on a website. That is covered at checked on a date, not checked forever.
A passing check is not an accreditation and does not carry an assurance. It means a named person looked on a stated date and found the business there.
If you are travelling any distance to somewhere you found here, ring first. We say so knowingly, and it undercuts the convenience of the register, because the alternative is that a date on a page eventually strands somebody.
In Plain English
We check that a shop, studio or workshop is real without ever publishing where somebody lives.
- The rule that never bends: no residential address, no personal mobile, no personal email, no names of family or staff. That holds even when the home is the registered or trading address, even when it is published elsewhere, and even when the operator asks.
- For a business run from home we do not find a careful way to describe the location. We drop the location question and verify by trading route instead, then publish that the location is not published.
- What we hold internally and what we render publicly are different sets. The internal set is the minimum required, is never exported, and comes out on request.
- Declining to list is a normal outcome. It says nothing about the business.
- Removal is free, unconditional and fast, and if we published something we should not have, it comes down before the argument.
- A check establishes existence and reachability on a date. It does not establish quality, safety, solvency, licensing, or that anywhere is open right now.
Read the method → /method/