Editorial policy

Editorial decisions are made by editors. Commercial relationships play no part in what we cover, how we assess it, or where a business appears in a ranking.

Nobody at LocalRank can both sell advertising and set an editorial position. That is enforced by our permission system, not by an understanding. See the advertising policy.

Every published article and ranking names an author and an editor. Both are real people with profiles on this site. We do not publish under invented bylines, house names or pseudonyms.

Pages show when they were published and when they were last reviewed. Those are stored dates. We do not refresh a timestamp to make old work look current.

Factual claims carry sources. Our editing system requires a source on any block flagged as a factual claim before it can pass fact check, and it will not accept a source URL that did not resolve when it was added.

Where a development was first reported elsewhere, we say so and link to the original. We do not reproduce other publishers’ articles, and we do not paraphrase someone else’s reporting and present it as our own.

Every piece moves through the same stages, and each has a gate that must pass:

1. Research — the question, the sample, and what can actually be verified.
2. Draft — needs a title, a standfirst, a body and a category.
3. Fact check — every factual claim needs a source.
4. SEO review — URL, description and canonical settled.
5. Editorial review — an editor signs off; rankings also need a methodology, a minimum number of entries, and a score with evidence for every criterion.
6. Published, with a review date set.

We use AI tools for:

• organising research and classifying material;
• extracting entities and detecting duplicates;
• summarising our own internal notes;
• suggesting headlines and catching grammar;
• flagging content that is going stale.

AI does not originate facts, prices, credentials, quotes, reviews, first-hand experience, authors or sources on LocalRank. Where a draft was AI-assisted, that is recorded internally, and it still requires a human author and editor before it can be published.

Images. Many of the pictures at the top of our guides are illustrations we generate with AI. Each one carries an “AI image by LocalRank” label. They set the scene and give a guide a feel for the area; they are not photographs of a specific restaurant or business, and nothing in them is evidence about a place. The facts in a guide come from the text, not the picture.

• Sell an editorial ranking position, in any form.
• Publish fabricated reviews, ratings, testing or testimonials.
• Invent an author, a source, a date or a quote.
• Remove accurate information because a business asked.
• Publish a page purely to target a search query.
• Mass-produce thin pages from database combinations.
• Show different content to search engines than to readers.

We correct errors promptly and visibly. Corrections that change a material fact are logged publicly on the page itself, with the date.

Report an error through the corrections form or at [email protected].