The standard

The record comes first.

Choosing a local business means trusting someone with your home, your money, or your time. You should be able to check the facts behind that decision.

Standard Local is being built around a simple idea: a recommendation is more useful when you can see what supports it. A record should help you make a decision, including when the available evidence is incomplete.

We propose the following commitments for every business record we publish.

1. Say exactly what was checked.

A license check should tell you which license, who holds it, where it applies, and when it was checked. It should not become a claim about workmanship. Evidence about one location should not quietly stand in for every location a business operates.

Each finding should have a clear scope. Where the evidence stops, the claim should stop too.

2. Keep the evidence attached.

Readers should be able to see the source behind a finding, the date it was checked, and how it supports the conclusion. An official record, a business’s own statement, a customer account, and our assessment should be clearly distinguished.

When evidence cannot be made public, the record should explain why and what that limits. Private material should never be presented as something readers can independently verify.

3. Leave unknowns visible.

Missing information is not a negative finding. Conflicting accounts should remain visible until the conflict is resolved. A polished page should not make a thin record look complete.

“Not checked,” “not found in this source,” and “confirmed absent” mean different things. The record should preserve those differences.

4. Put a date on the information.

Businesses change. Licenses expire, locations close, and ownership changes. Each claim should show when it was checked, any known validity period, and whether another review is due.

Old evidence should not continue to look current because the rest of the page was recently updated.

5. Keep payment out of the finding.

No business should be able to buy a favorable assessment, a better position in a recommendation, or the removal of an accurate finding. Nonpaying businesses should be assessed under the same criteria. Corrections should be free.

Commercial relationships and conflicts should be disclosed where they matter. The proposed separation between revenue and assessment is set out in Ownership and funding.

6. Make the work open to challenge.

A business or customer should be able to submit evidence, question a finding, and receive a reasoned response. A business should have a fair chance to respond to an adverse assessment.

Material corrections should show what changed, when, and why, while protecting private information. A disputed finding should not be treated as settled simply because we published it first.

7. Explain the judgment.

When Standard Local makes an assessment, it should publish the criteria, the evidence considered, and the limits of the conclusion. Comparable businesses should face the same criteria. Exceptions should be explained.

A complete set of documents is not proof of good service. Any judgment about service quality needs evidence about actual work and an honest account of how that evidence was selected.

8. Let people check whether we kept these commitments.

The methods, coverage limits, funding disclosures, and correction history should be public. As records become available, we propose publishing measures of their freshness, errors found, and corrections made, with enough context to interpret the numbers.

These pages describe the standard we want to meet. Whether we meet it must be shown by the records and the work behind them.

Read the proposed approach

• Our methods: what gets checked and how conclusions are reached.
• Coverage: who is included and where the gaps are.
• Ownership and funding: who controls the work and how money is kept separate.
• Corrections and appeals: how a finding can be challenged.
• Data and access: how people and software should be able to use the same record.