Public methodology
The answer is never for sale.
A place has to pass an independence gate. Each fact has to stand on its own evidence. A request is ordered only by the things that help answer it. Then every factual sentence has to point back to the facts we actually hold.
- Ordering
- rank-v3
- Candidate boundary
- feature-contract-v3
- Vouch signal
- vouch-normalisation-v1
The route to a public result
Four gates. No blended trust score.
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Independent?
Ownership and control evidence decides whether the place may enter the public set.
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Fact-safe?
Every value keeps its own source, how sure we are of it, the dates we checked it, and whether anyone has flagged it as wrong.
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Request-fit?
Relevance comes first; availability, distance and a bounded vouch band refine the order.
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Grounded?
An Ask sentence is shown only when its citations resolve to the public facts in scope.
Gate 01 · inclusion
Independent is an evidence decision, not a vibe.
We assess who ultimately owns and controls the business, including related organisations and brands. A reviewer records the evidence, reason, decision date and a finite recheck date. Only Eligible — confirmed may be published, indexed or recommended.
The check says only that the independence rule was met. It does not certify quality, safety, service, value or universal accuracy. Confirming an owner's identity is a separate process and cannot make a business eligible.
Gate 02 · fact by fact
A trustworthy page is a stack of small claims.
Trust does not wash across a profile. An opening time can be current while an accessibility detail is unknown. Each approved version of a value keeps the value itself, a source we can point to, how sure we are of it, when it was seen or confirmed, when it is next due a check, and whether anyone has flagged it as wrong.
Time changes how current a fact is; it never silently rewrites where a fact came from or how sure we are of it. Anything inferred, unknown, weakly sourced, stale or flagged is hedged in plain words or withheld according to the evidence policy—it is never promoted into a stronger claim by the page around it.
- Where it came from
- Official sourceOwner confirmedBusiness publicationCommunity reportedInferredUnknown
- How sure we are
- highmediumlowunknown
- How recent it is
- currentagingstaleunknown
- Flagged as wrong?
- noneopenunder reviewresolved upheldresolved changedwithdrawn
Gate 03 · rank-v3
First: does it answer the request?
Relevance decides whether a place is a candidate at all. The current order then uses four bounded signals. Availability cannot turn an irrelevant place into an answer, and unknown availability is not treated as closed.
- Required
Relevance
Category and current public fact text matched to the request.
- Bounded
Availability
A known time-window fit or a small open-now nudge when the request asks for now.
- Bounded
Distance
A capped penalty only when the reader supplies an origin and radius.
- Bounded
Normalised vouch band
The database supplies only nonelowmediumhigh . The policy accounts for profile age and opportunity before ranking sees the band.
Closed candidate envelope · feature-contract-v3
Only five keys cross the boundary
- location id
- eligibility
- geography
- facts
- normalized vouch signal band
Unknown keys are rejected. Spend, entitlements, offers, campaigns, images, commercial-service fields and correction-priority overrides do not cross this boundary. Where each fact came from, how sure we are, how current it is and whether it has been flagged travel with the safe facts; the current scorer does not turn them into a general reputation score or a direct payment-like boost.
Gate 04 · grounded Ask
The model writes. The evidence decides what survives.
Ask works inside one named area. It receives a short list of eligible places and current public facts—not the open web, private records or a model's memory. Every factual sentence must cite keys that resolve to those facts. Unsupported sentences are dropped.
If no supported sentence remains, Ask refuses rather than guessing. It also refuses unsafe or out-of-scope requests, and keeps an outage distinct from “nothing matched”. Published answers remain grounded records and use the same correction route as the pages they cite.
Corrections, reports and removal
A report starts a review. It does not rewrite a fact by itself.
Anyone can point out something wrong, misleading or unsafe. The report stays attached to the thing it is about, and any evidence-backed change goes through the same fact workflow rather than overwriting the published value in place.
When a listing is removed, that removal is not treated as complete after one database write. The case stays open until we have checked it is gone from every place it could still show up.
- 01 public page
- 02 search
- 03 answers
- 04 feeds
- 05 caches
- 06 reseed guard stops a later rebuild adding it back
The commercial firewall
Payment cannot buy inclusion, position or trust.
Optional paid extras are not open. The only controlled “Coming soon” notice is inside the authenticated owner Extras area; there are no public offers, prices or actions here.
If paid features open later, payment still cannot affect eligibility, ranking, how up to date facts are, corrections, verification, vouches or editorial inclusion. Paid state is structurally kept outside the free-core discovery candidate and answer evidence.