Directory and Listing Terms

1. Claiming a listing

• Who can claim. Only the owner of the business, or a person the business has authorized (an employee, or an agency acting for it), may claim its listing. By claiming you confirm that you have that authority.
• Proof. You prove control in one of these ways: by signing in with a Google account that manages the business's verified Google Business Profile; with a code we email to an address at the business's own website domain (free email addresses do not count); by putting a code we give you on the business's own website (our badge, a meta tag or a file); or by asking us to check by hand. When a website domain is shared by several businesses, such as a franchise or dealer group site, a person checks the claim. We may ask for more proof, put a claim in review, or refuse it.
• We tell the business. When a claim is accepted without a person checking it, we tell the business at a public contact address we hold for it. If the business says the claim was not made by it or someone it authorized, we suspend the claimant's access to the listing until we have checked, and we may revoke the claim.
• Free. Claiming is free, with no trial, no end date and no card. Paid plans are optional and do not change your ranking.
• Several claimants. If more than one person claims the same business, or a business is already managed, we decide who manages it. We may add a claimant as an extra administrator, or ask the people involved to settle it.
• Tell us at once if you lose the authority to manage the business, for example because you left it or it was sold.

2. What a claimed listing lets you do

• Edit the description, hours, categories and website. With a paid plan (Starter or above), most changes appear at once; some, such as a new name, a new phone number, a new main category or a website on another domain, are checked by us before they appear. Without a paid plan, we may treat your changes as suggestions and check them before they appear.
• Choose the review platforms your profile features (section 3).
• Hide "Similar businesses nearby" on your profile.
• Embed a badge where the business qualifies (section 9).

Changes usually show on your profile within an hour.

3. Featured review platforms

A business with a claimed listing can choose which review platforms its profile features, and in what order. The rules:

• Whole platforms only. You choose platforms, such as Google or Healthgrades. You can never hide, remove, reorder or pick individual reviews.
• Display only. The rating, the review count, the Grades.com Score, the letter grade, eligibility for rankings and the review summary always use every review platform we monitor for the business, whether it is featured or not. Featuring a platform, or leaving one out, can never raise a score, a grade or a rank.
• We decide which platforms we monitor for a business and which we can show at all; some sites limit what we may display (see How we use reviews).

4. What no one can change

No business, whether it has claimed its listing, pays for a plan or neither, can edit, remove or reorder:

• its rating, review counts, Grades.com Score, grade or rank;
• the AI summary of its reviews, or the answers AI assistants gave about it;
• any individual review.

If an input is wrong, for example a review site matched to the wrong business or a summary sentence the reviews do not support, tell us on Correct or remove a listing and we fix it. We correct facts; we do not change a result because someone disagrees with it. How scores and rankings work is on How we rank.

Reviews left on Grades.com. A review a customer leaves on a business's Grades.com review form appears on the business's directory profile and counts in its grade only when the business uses Public mode and the reviewer has confirmed their e-mail address. Reviews a business features in "Business chooses what to feature" mode are labelled "Selected by the business" and never count in the grade, ratings, review counts or badges. Private feedback is never published. Businesses cannot remove, edit or hide reviews left on Grades.com; Grades.com moderates them under the Review Policy.

5. Your obligations

• Truthful and current. Everything you add must be true and up to date: name, hours, categories, website, phone, description and photos. Mark the business closed, or tell us, when it closes or moves.
• No advertising in the listing. Descriptions may not contain links, email addresses, phone numbers, prices, promotions, ALL-CAPS text or claims you cannot back up, such as "#1" or "best in town".
• Licenses. If your profession is licensed or regulated, describe it accurately and follow its advertising rules. That is your responsibility.
• Reviews. Follow the rules for reviews in section 8 of the Terms of Service: no fake, insider or paid reviews, no gating, no pressure on reviewers.
• One listing per location. Do not create duplicate or fake listings, and do not claim a competitor's.
• Reviewers. Do not use your listing or anything you learn from it to harass or identify reviewers.

6. Content you add

• You keep ownership of what you add. While the listing exists, you give us a non-exclusive, royalty-free license to publish it on your profile and elsewhere in the directory, in machine-readable form for search engines and AI assistants that read our pages, and in the dated records we keep of past profiles and rankings. You can ask us at any time to remove photos and descriptions you added; factual corrections and reviews stay.
• You confirm you have the rights to it, including to any photo or logo.
• Details the business gives us take priority over other sources, and the profile shows them as coming from the business.
• We may reformat, shorten, decline or remove what you add if it breaks these terms. We keep a history of changes.
• If you stop managing the listing, factual details you gave (such as hours or categories) stay on it as its last confirmed facts until a newer source replaces them.

7. Moderation and our decisions

We check some changes before they appear, and we may reject a change, mark a business closed, merge duplicates, leave a business out of rankings because of an integrity problem (described on How we rank), or remove a person's access to a listing if they break these terms or lose their authority. If you disagree with a decision, reply to it and a second person reviews it.

8. Ending a claim, and removal

• You can stop managing a listing at any time by writing to us. The listing stays in the directory as a public listing.
• The owner or an authorized representative can ask us to remove the business from the directory, free of charge, under the policy on Correct or remove a listing. Removal takes the whole business out of every list; it does not remove reviews from the sites where they were written.
• Claiming a listing lifts an earlier removal.

9. Badges

A business that qualifies can show a free grade or ranking badge on its own website. Badges are live images that always show the current grade or rank, and they follow the Badge terms. A badge is never required for a ranking and never changes one.

10. No endorsement, no guarantee

A listing, a score, a grade, a ranking or a badge is not an endorsement, certification or recommendation by Grades.com. We do not promise that a listing will bring visits, calls or customers, or that a score or rank will stay the same. Being listed does not mean a business is a Grades.com customer.

11. Changes

We may change these terms. For a material change we tell the people who manage claimed listings by email before it takes effect. If you keep managing your listing after that, the new terms apply.

12. Contact

Questions about these terms or a claim: