Why we don't sell badges
The tick next to a tradesperson's name on most platforms is a product someone bought. We don't sell one, and it's worth explaining exactly why.
The economics of a trust mark
Follow the money on any “vetted” badge and you usually find a membership fee. The platform's revenue comes from the businesses being badged — which means the badge's issuer is paid by the party being trusted, not the party doing the trusting. That is not a conspiracy; it is just an incentive, and incentives win over time. A platform earning £50–£100 a month per badged member cannot easily remove badges at scale, audit them deeply, or tell you how little the check involved — every one of those honest acts costs it revenue.
You do not have to take our word for the consequences. Regulators on both sides of the Atlantic have taken action against home-services platforms over misleading lead and vetting practices, and the public review pages of the UK's big trade directories carry the same complaint patterns year after year. Search any of their names next to the word “reviews” and read what tradespeople themselves say.
What we do instead
We show the evidence and tell you who collected it: Google's rating and review count, unaltered, on one fixed scale, beside every name. Where the law regulates a trade, we link the official register — Gas Safe, NICEIC, ARB — so you can check a tradesperson against the body that actually inspects them. And where we have checked nothing, we say so, in words, on the page.
The one label we do sell is placement — Featured — and it is labelled as paid everywhere it appears, in grey, never dressed as merit. Paid reach is a legitimate product. Paid trust is not.
How to read any badge, anywhere
Three questions dissolve most trust marks: Who pays the issuer? What was actually checked, in writing? Can the badge be lost, and has anyone ever lost it? If the answers are “the business”, “it doesn't say”, and “unclear” — you have learned what the badge is for. The registers that pass this test are the statutory ones, which is why those are the only ones we link.