Review policy

Requires legal review before production publication. This policy describes how reviews work on LokalMatch today. It isn't final legal language and may change before LokalMatch launches publicly.

Reviews are for people who've had a real experience with a pro, such as getting a quote or having work done. You need to be signed in, you can review each pro once, and you can't review your own business.

You don't need to have found the pro through LokalMatch. Reviews that aren't linked to a LokalMatch connection go through the same moderation, but they don't carry the verified label.

A review is marked verified when it's linked to a request the reviewer sent through LokalMatch and that this pro connected with. The label confirms that connection. It doesn't confirm that the job was done or paid for, or how it went.

About two to four weeks after a pro connects with a request, we email the homeowner once to invite a review of that pro, whatever their experience. We don't check whether someone is happy before inviting them, and pros can't choose who is invited or stop invitations. Homeowners who've turned off emails about their requests don't get invitations.

LokalMatch doesn't offer money, credits, discounts or prize draw entries for writing a review. Lokal Rewards and referral rewards never depend on leaving a review or on what it says.

Pros may not offer anything in exchange for a review, a particular rating, or changing or removing a review. If we ever offer an incentive for reviews, it will be the same whatever the rating, and every review that received one will be clearly labelled.

A person checks every review before it's published. Automated checks flag things like links and contact details for a closer look. Positive and negative reviews go through the same checks and the same standards.

We don't edit what reviewers write: we publish a review as written, or not at all.

We don't publish, or we remove, a review that:

A pro's rating is the average of their published reviews, verified or not, shown with the number of reviews it's based on. Pending and removed reviews don't count, and the rating and count are updated whenever a review is published or removed.

Each profile shows the reviews written in the language of the page.

Pros can post one public response to each review of their business, and update it later. Responses must be factual and polite, and must not include threats, accusations of fraud or anyone's personal information. If a response breaks these rules, report it by writing to trust@lokalmatch.com.

Anyone can report a review with the report link on it, without an account, or by writing to trust@lokalmatch.com. You can report a review as fake, as a conflict of interest, as offensive, as containing personal information or as being about the wrong business, or tell us about something else.

A person looks at every report, and we remove reviews that break this policy.

Pros who post, buy or arrange fake reviews, offer rewards for reviews or pressure reviewers may lose verification labels, have their account restricted or be suspended.

Each review shows the reviewer's display name, the date it was published and, where available, the project type and the city or region. We never show a reviewer's street address or contact details.