How this register works

Browse the live directory, try Stumble, or suggest a business. All submissions require editorial review. The reference material below describes the published standard; it is not evidence that an individual business has been checked. No public dataset export or automated check log is offered.

Everything that lets you audit this site in one place: the bar entries must clear, the checks behind every date, the patterns we refuse, the tombstone procedure, and the money that never touches any of it.

The short version

A register is only as good as the things it refuses. Ours publishes its criteria before its records, dates every claim it makes, keeps the businesses that die instead of deleting them, refuses to rate anyone, and takes no money from the businesses it lists.

Each of those is a separate document, because each of them is something you should be able to check independently rather than take as a bundle.

The documents, in reading order

1. The entry bar

Six criteria, every automatic exclusion, and the disclosure rule for publisher-owned properties. Read it.

2. The method

How a check runs, the four outcomes, the failure sequence, and what a passing check does not tell you. Read it.

3. The changelog

Append-only version history for the method and the bar, including what each change invalidated. Read it.

4. The refusal file

Anonymised patterns we turn down, each tied to the criterion it failed. Read it.

5. Gone

Businesses confirmed no longer trading, kept with the date of their final check. Read it.

6. Who pays for this

Every way we could take money for a listing, and the mechanism that stops it. Read it.

7. The Line

The permanent list of things this site refuses to publish at all. Read it.

8. Corrections

What we got wrong, dated and described, including the errors readers caught. Read it.

The four things that make an entry an entry

A named reviewer. Not a team, not a process — a person, recorded on the record.
A date, bound to a required row in a dated check log so it cannot be typed in or refreshed by a build.
A description written here, in our words. Operator copy appears only as an attributed quote.
The version of the bar and the method that produced it, so an old entry stays interpretable.

An entry missing any of these does not publish. That is enforced when the site is built, not remembered by an editor.

What we deliberately do not do

No ratings, scores, stars, tiers or best-of lists — the record structure has no field for one and rejects it if added. No paid inclusion, position or removal. No affiliate links inside any record. No location-by-category pages. No framing of anyone else's website inside ours. No residential addresses, ever.

The reasoning for each is at the Line, and the specific case against ratings is at why we don't rate anyone.

Current state

This edition supplies no assessment log, so the observed entry count and refusal rate are not measured. The register and the entry bar define the complete schema and criteria without promising a future dataset.

If you want to audit us

Read the entry bar and pick a criterion you think is unenforceable.
Read the method and check whether the criterion actually has a procedure behind it.
Look at any entry and confirm it carries a reviewer, a date and a version.
Check the version against the changelog.
Tell us what you found at corrections. We publish the ones we get wrong.

Questions about the mechanism

Why split this across so many pages instead of one policy page?

Because each part should be checkable on its own. Bundled into a single policy statement, a weak criterion hides behind a strong one and nobody can point at the specific thing they disagree with.

What stops a future editor quietly relaxing the bar?

Partly the version history, which makes a change visible, and partly the checks any conforming implementation must run, which reject a record missing a reviewer, a date or a version. Neither is impossible to circumvent and we would not claim otherwise — which is why what we would have to do to go bad names the external signals to watch for.