How We List, Verify and Rate Businesses

This page explains where the information on Listingo comes from, what the Verified badge means, how ratings are worked out and how listings are ordered. We want you to know exactly what you're looking at when you choose a business.

How businesses are listed

Businesses are listed on Listingo by the business: the owner, or someone they've authorised, adds the name, category, address, contact details, opening hours, photos and description. Listing is free.

• A listing goes live only when it's complete: it needs a location and a way to get in touch.
• Every listing is checked as it's saved. Names can't carry sales slogans, added place names, repeated keywords, emojis or words in capitals for attention. Phone numbers must be valid Indian or international numbers, and email addresses and websites must exist. Listings in categories we don't accept are refused. The full rules are in our Listing Eligibility & Acceptability policy.
• A new name, email address, website or address on a live listing is reviewed by our team before it appears, so a public listing can't be quietly taken over.

A listing without an owner on Listingo shows a Claim this listing button. A claim from an account whose email address is the one on the listing is approved straight away, because the owner has shown they control the business's email. Any other claim is checked by our team before the listing changes hands.

What "Verified" means

A business shows the Verified badge in one of two ways:

• A proof check. The business sends proof that it's real and that the people managing the listing represent it, for example by phone, by email, with a document such as a registration certificate, or through its website. A member of our team checks it before the badge is given. The badge then lasts one year, after which the business checks again to keep it.
• A paid plan or badge. Some paid plans include the Verified badge, and businesses can also buy it for a set number of days. It shows for as long as they've paid for.

Either way, Verified is about the listing, not about how good the business is. It isn't an endorsement or a guarantee of the work, and it never changes a business's rating or reviews.

How reviews and ratings work

Reviews come from customers with a Listingo account.

• Each person can review a business once, and must have confirmed their email address first.
• Owners and managers can't review their own business. They can reply to reviews in public.
• Reviews are published as they're written. We don't hold back reviews because they're negative, and businesses can't pay to remove or hide them.
• Anyone can report a review they believe is fake, abusive or about the wrong business. Our team checks every report and removes reviews that break our rules.

A business's rating is the average of the star ratings (1 to 5) in all its published reviews, shown to one decimal place next to the number of reviews it's based on. Every review counts equally. A rating is only shown when a business has at least one review; we never fill in a rating that doesn't exist.

Where a city or category page names its "highest rated" business, only businesses with at least three reviews are considered, so one glowing review can't top the list.

How listings are ordered

On city, category and search pages, listings are ordered by these rules, in this order:

1. When you search for something, how closely the listing matches what you searched for.
2. On a city or area page, businesses based there come before businesses that only serve it.
3. Businesses on a paid plan that includes priority ranking come before businesses that don't. This moves a listing up among equally relevant results; it never changes its rating or reviews.
4. Verified businesses, then higher average ratings, then more reviews.

You can sort by rating, number of reviews or distance instead. Separately, some pages show a Sponsored section, where businesses pay to appear, and a Featured section. Both are always labelled.

The numbers on our pages

Counts such as "24 dentists in Gurugram", the number of verified businesses and the average rating are counted from the live listings shown on that page. They're refreshed through the day, so they may be a few minutes behind a listing that has just changed. We only publish a city or category page for search engines once it has enough listings to be useful.

Corrections

If something on a listing is wrong, or a business has closed, please report the listing and our team will look into it. Owners can update their own listing at any time from their dashboard. For anything else, contact us.