Last updated 22 Sep 2026
Moderation before publication
Every review is checked before it appears — not after somebody complains. Automated checks run first: length, all-caps ratio, links, submission rate per address, account age. What clears them goes to a person who reads it before it goes live. What doesn't clear them is held for a closer look, never silently dropped.
Anti-fraud
Agency reviews attract two specific kinds of abuse: an agency writing its own praise, and a competitor writing the opposite. Against both:
- Rate limits. An account cannot post more than a few reviews a day, and cannot review the same agency twice.
- Address hashing. We hash the IP address behind each submission so we can spot a cluster of accounts posting from one place, without storing anyone's raw address.
- Reviewer quality signals. An account with a single review, or one whose reviews get flagged repeatedly, counts for less in an agency's average.
- Velocity gate. A sudden burst of five-star reviews on a quiet page holds the newest ones until a moderator has looked.
- Turnstile. Signup, reviews from unverified accounts, anonymous flags and the contact form all pass through Cloudflare Turnstile.
Reviews from people who work for the agency, or for a competing one, come down when we find them.
No paid removals, no paid position
An agency cannot pay to have a genuine negative review taken down, and cannot pay to rank higher in the catalog. What a subscription buys is on the pricing page, and position is not in the list. A review comes down only when it breaks the guidelines.
Agency replies
Once an agency has claimed its page, its verified team can reply to any review in public. Replies alternate — the client can answer back — and carry a badge so it is clear which side is speaking. Replies follow the same guidelines as reviews and can be removed if they cross them.
Compiled listings and imported ratings
Some pages here were compiled from public business-listing data rather than created by the agency: name, address, phone, opening hours, services and the ratings published in that listing. We show those ratings in their own tab, labelled and dated, and they are never mixed into reviews written on this site. An agency that claims its page can correct the details; addresses and phone numbers an owner has edited are never overwritten by a later refresh.
The SignalSumo score is ours, and it is not a rating
The score out of 100 on some pages is set by our team from public data about the agency's own website — authority, technical health, organic traffic — plus how complete their profile here is. Three things follow from that: it is not customer feedback, it is not automated (a person sets it, and the page shows the date), and it is not for sale. Agencies without a website are not scored at all, and the page says so rather than guessing.
Community flags
Anyone can flag a review as spam, fake, offensive, off-topic, containing personal information, or something else. Three unresolved flags hide a live review until a moderator looks again. Flag reasons are visible to moderators only and never appear on the page.
Moderation log
Every moderation action — publish, hide, remove, restore — is recorded with the moderator and the reason. A removed review leaves the public rating and search results, but the record is kept so decisions can be audited and reversed.
Claim verification
An agency takes over its page by proving control of its domain: a role-based email at the domain, a DNS TXT or CNAME record, a file in the webroot, or a meta tag. Checks run on our side, tokens expire after seven days, and switching method invalidates the previous one. Listings with no website are verified by hand against the phone number and address on the listing. A claim obtained by misrepresentation is revoked.
What happens to an enquiry you send
When you use Contact agency, your message goes to that one agency's dashboard and nowhere else. We do not sell enquiries, do not broker them to several agencies at once, and do not add you to a marketing list. On the free plan the agency sees what you need with your name and contact details masked; on a paid plan it sees them and can reply. Either way the agency you wrote to is the only one who ever gets it. See the privacy policy for how long we keep it.
Where we're honest about the limits
- We verify that a reviewer is a real account, not that an invoice exists — except for invited reviews, which carry the Verified badge.
- A compiled listing is only as accurate as the public data behind it, which is why claiming and correcting it matters.
- The SignalSumo score measures an agency's own website, which is evidence of craft, not proof of the work they will do for you. Read it next to the reviews, not instead of them.
- A quiet page with two reviews is a small sample. We show the count next to the average for that reason.
Report a problem
A review that shouldn't be up: use Report this review on the agency page. Something broader — a pattern of abuse, a page claimed by the wrong person, a security issue — contact us.