How verification works
What each indicator on a company profile means, what we checked to award it, and what it does not tell you.
Every indicator on a company profile has a definition, and every definition says what it does not cover. That second half is the part that matters: a badge that only ever says something reassuring is decoration.
These are rendered from the same source the profiles use, so what you read here is exactly what a badge means where you saw it.
Claimed
Someone at this company has taken control of the listing and maintains it.
What it does not mean: It does not mean we endorse them, or that anything they wrote has been independently checked.
Representative verified
We confirmed the person managing this listing is connected to the company, using an email address on its own domain, its published phone number, or documents a moderator reviewed.
What it does not mean: It confirms the person, not the company’s conduct or the accuracy of its figures.
Matched to a public register
An identifier for this company appears in a regulator’s own public register, and we link to it so you can check.
What it does not mean: Appearing in a register is not approval, by the regulator or by us.
Checked by our team
A moderator read this listing before it was published, and reads each set of changes.
What it does not mean: We check listings against our guidelines. We are not able to verify every figure a company publishes.
Where the underlying facts come from
Each profile carries a line saying how many of its details are matched against an official record and how many came from the company. We keep those two things apart deliberately: who asserted a fact and who checked it are different questions, and a figure a company published about itself should not be presented as one somebody verified.
Records go stale, so we re-check them
A regulatory record claims something in the present tense — that a company is listed now. Registers change, so records are re-checked on a schedule, and each one shows the date it was last confirmed. If we can no longer find a company in a register it was previously matched to, the record is withdrawn and the profile says so. It is not left standing because it was true once.
What cannot be bought
No verification indicator can be purchased, at any price, and paid placement does not grant one. See our neutrality policy.
If you think an indicator is wrong
Tell us. If a register entry we linked does not say what we say it says, that is a mistake we want to fix quickly.