How rankings, data, and sponsorships work

What “verified” means

A shop is verified when its name, address, and at least one contact method were confirmed from the shop’s own official website, an owner claim, or another independent public source — and the date of that check is recorded on the listing. Verification is about provenance, not quality: we are asserting that the facts came from a source we can point at, not that the shop is good.

A shop is unverified when we have only discovered that it might exist — usually from a public directory or sitemap. Unverified candidates are held in an import queue. They do not appear on city pages, in search results, on the map, or in our sitemaps, and they cannot move a city through the readiness gate below. A competitor listing is a lead, never a publishable fact.

When a listing is complete enough to be useful

Each listing is scored on six facts. Address and a map location are required outright — without them we cannot send anyone anywhere, so the record is not counted at all. A listing is treated as complete at 60%, which is what you get with an address, a map location, and at least one of a phone number, a website, or opening hours.

How a city goes live

A city page is only worth publishing if it beats a plain search for the same thing. So a city goes live when both of these are true:

• At least 2 verified shops in the city. One shop is a shop page, not a city page — we send that traffic to the shop’s own profile instead.
• At least 50% of them complete (and never fewer than 1). A page can hit a shop count and still read as filler if most entries are just names.

There is one narrow alternative: a claimed and verified notable shop, plus a confirmed upcoming event, plus genuinely unique factual content about the market. An editor can also publish a city on demonstrated search demand. Neither route skips the completeness requirement.

A city that has verified shops but has not cleared the gate stays reachable — you can still see the shops we have — but the page is marked noindex and is left out of our sitemaps, so it cannot become search-engine clutter. A city with nothing verified in it returns a 404 rather than an empty “card shops in…” page.

How a state goes live

A state publishes at 3 verified shops, or at 1 verified shop plus a confirmed upcoming event. All 50 states and DC always have a reachable page so you can follow coverage, but a state below the bar is noindex.

A state can be live while none of its cities are — three verified shops spread across three different towns makes a useful statewide list and three thin city pages. In that case we publish the state list and keep the city pages out of the index.

When a shop profile is indexed

A shop profile is indexed once it has a verified name, a complete address, at least one reliable contact method, a stable map location, core category or service facts (or an owner claim), and no unresolved duplicate or closure conflict.

Organic ranking

Published and operational shops first, then query relevance, then distance when there is a search point, then verified completeness and freshness, then a deterministic name tie-break. Lists are paginated at 24 results so the order is stable and reproducible.

Paid inventory renders in dedicated, labeled slots. It is never an organic ranking signal, and paying us cannot move a shop up the organic list. No more than one paid unit appears before the first organic result, and no more than one per six organic cards.

Data source priority

Owner claims and official shop websites outrank licensed business data, official manufacturer locators, public directories, and community tips, in that order. An automated source can never overwrite a verified owner — it opens a conflict for review instead. Accuracy is free forever: claiming a listing or sending a correction costs nothing and is never behind a plan.