Current implementation: The live directory and Stumble use approved, public listings. The checking and correction procedures below are editorial responsibilities. Editors must unpublish stale, disputed, closed, or removal-requested entries; no automated check-log, scheduled recheck, or downloadable export is claimed. Contact uses the contact form, which asks for a reply email and needs no login. The current discovery rules describe the implemented draw.
The most useful thing anyone can tell a newly listed operator is what not to expect. This page is that, written in advance of the first entry so the terms are known before anyone agrees to them rather than discovered afterwards.
What this is, and who it is for
For an operator whose business is in the register, or is thinking about being. It sets out precisely what a listing is, what it is not, what we will ask of you afterwards, and how to leave.
It is deliberately deflationary. If you read it and conclude that being listed is a small thing, you have read it correctly. A small, accurate thing is what we are able to offer, and describing it as more than that is where listing sites start going wrong.
One point of context. No entry has published yet. This is written before the register opens, which means nothing below is a summary of how it has gone for anyone. It is the commitment, published first, so it can be held against later.
What actually changes: a page, a date, and a place in the rotation
Three things, and this is the complete list.
A page exists. One entry page, with one sentence on what the business is, written here in our words rather than taken from your marketing copy. Plus what a customer can actually do there, which is one of buy, hire, book, read or visit. Plus a link out to you, direct, with no interstitial and no tracking redirect that hides the destination. If you said something about your business that we could not check but wanted to repeat, it appears as a quote attributed to you with a capture date, or it does not appear.
A date sits next to it. The date a named person last checked the business, bound to a row in the check log, along with the version of the method that produced it and the version of the criteria the entry was admitted under. The date is the actual product. The entry is the wrapper around it.
The entry joins the rotation. It becomes one of the things a visitor to the discovery surface may be shown. How that works is published in full, it takes no commercial input of any kind, and there is no way to appear more often.
That is everything. There is no paid tier or required badge. Owners can sign in to claim and manage listings; readers can browse without an account.
What does not change: your traffic, your ranking, your revenue
Being listed here is unlikely to change your business's numbers, and we make no claim that it will.
Not a hedged claim, not a modest one, not an implied one. We do not tell operators that a listing drives enquiries, that it helps them get found, or that it does anything for their position anywhere else. Every listing site in the category makes some version of that promise and most of them cannot evidence it.
Nor is being listed an endorsement, and we will not describe it as one. Clearing the bar means a business is real, independently owned, reachable, not primarily an advertising or affiliate vehicle, and was trading when a named person looked. It says nothing about whether the business is good, and the register says so on its own pages. If anyone represents inclusion here as a mark of quality, they are representing something we did not say.
There is also no position to have gained. Nothing on this site is rated, scored, ranked or tiered. We do not rate anyone explains why, including what that costs a reader. For an operator the practical consequence is simple: there is nothing here to climb, so there is nothing to optimise for, and any effort spent trying would be wasted.
Why we will not tell you how much traffic we sent you
You may want a number. We are not going to produce one, for two reasons.
The first is that we do not have it. Outbound links go straight to you. We do not route clicks through a tracking redirect, because doing so would let us count them at the cost of hiding the destination from the person clicking, and that trade is not one we are willing to make. Analytics here are privacy-respecting and do not follow anyone off the site.
The second is that a number of that kind, once published, becomes the thing the site is about. As soon as an operator can see what a listing "delivers", the pressure arrives to make it deliver more, to sell more of it, and to order entries by whatever produces it. That is the road to a rating field, and the field name is rejected at build precisely so nobody can take the first step accidentally.
Your own analytics will show referrals if you look for them. That data belongs to you, and it is a better measurement than anything we could offer.
If being found is the actual problem, almost all of the work that moves it happens on your own site rather than on anyone's listing page. What being findable actually takes is the honest account of that, and it costs nothing to read.
What we will ask of you: nothing, except accuracy
There is no obligation attached to being listed. Specifically, we will not ask you to:
- Display a badge, seal or logo.
- Link back to us, from anywhere, ever. There is no reciprocal link expectation and nothing about your entry depends on one.
- Mention the listing anywhere, or notify your audience.
- Provide content, a quote, an interview or a story. A story does not earn an entry and an entry does not earn a story.
- Subscribe to anything, join anything, or maintain any relationship with us at all.
- Buy anything. Nothing on this site is sold to listed businesses, and buying anything that may exist in future has no effect on register consideration in either direction.
The one thing worth doing is telling us when something changes: you moved, your hours changed, you stopped selling the thing we described, or you are pausing. How to keep your entry accurate sets out the four changes worth a message and what happens to each. It takes a couple of sentences and there is no form gate in front of it.
How often we will re-check, and what happens if you fail one
Re-checks happen on a published cadence that varies by entry type, with physical businesses checked more often than online-only ones because their details go stale faster. The method sets the cadence, and the current values live in the field dictionary rather than in prose, so a machine reading the register can act on them rather than guess.
From your side, a re-check is a person doing what the first reviewer did: confirming the destination still resolves, that the page still describes the same business doing the same thing, that a customer can still act, and that there is still a way to reach a human. How we check a business is still trading is the full procedure.
Four outcomes are possible, and only one of them is bad.
- Alive. The date advances. Nothing else happens and you hear nothing from us.
- Changed. The business is reachable but is materially doing something different. A person re-reviews the entry against the bar and either rewrites it or removes it. If it no longer clears a criterion, the entry goes, and that removal is not an accusation. The note will say only that it no longer meets the bar.
- Unreachable. One failed check does nothing at all and nothing is published about it. Sites go down, certificates expire on a Friday, people take a week off.
- Gone. This requires two failures at least fourteen days apart plus a person confirming it independently, looking for the things a script cannot see: a move, a rebrand, a sale, a pause. Only then does the entry become a tombstone with the date of its final check.
If we ever mark you as closed and you are not, tell us and it is reinstated, the error is logged in public, and the sequence that produced it gets reviewed. Reinstatement is free and does not require you to prove anything beyond being there. Wrongly marking a trading business as closed is the most damaging error this site can make, and it is treated accordingly.
How to leave
Ask, and the entry goes.
Free, no reason required, no account or login, no verification hoop disproportionate to the request, and nobody will try to talk you out of it or offer you a downgrade instead. Removal takes the entry off the public directory and discovery pool. No downloadable machine-readable export is currently offered.
You can also ask for narrower things: stay in the register but out of the discovery rotation, remove a quote attributed to you whatever the context, correct a fact rather than remove the entry, or never be listed again. That last one is recorded and honoured.
Charging for removal, or making removal slow enough that paying feels easier, is one of the specific practices our work on directories exists to describe. It would be awkward to write that and then do it.
What we will never do with your listing
- Sell, rent or license it. The register may not be reconstituted as a lead or marketing list, and that restriction binds us as much as it binds anyone consuming the export. Operator contact data is not a product.
- Take money from you for anything. There is no paid inclusion, paid position, paid removal, featured tier or expedited review, and if a listed business offers, we decline rather than disclose. Who pays for this site lists every model the category runs on and why none of them operates here.
- Contact you with an offer. No upsell, no sponsorship pitch, no "upgrade your listing", no partnership approach. The only messages you should ever get are about the entry itself.
- Put an affiliate link in your entry. Not in an entry, a category page, a tombstone or the discovery surface, permanently.
- Rate, score or rank you, or let anyone else do so on our pages. There are no reviews here and no aggregated ratings pulled in from elsewhere.
- Frame your site. The discovery surface shows our own entry page and links out. Framing strips your analytics, breaks your consent flows, and is not ours to do.
- Publish a residential address, including where a home is the business address.
In Plain English
Being listed gets you one page with a description in our words, a dated check, a link straight to you, and a place in the discovery rotation. It does not get you traffic, a ranking, an endorsement, a badge or a position, and we will not claim otherwise, because inclusion means the business is real and was trading when somebody looked, not that it is good. We cannot tell you how many people we sent you, because we do not track clicks off the site and would not want a number that turns the register into a performance product. We ask nothing of you except that you tell us when something changes. Re-checks happen on a published cadence, one failed check means nothing, and a closure needs two failures fourteen days apart plus a human confirmation. If you want out, ask, and it goes, free and without a conversation.
Keep your entry accurate is the only thing worth doing once you are listed, and it takes two sentences.