CityvettedEditorial independence: why businesses cannot pay for placement
No sponsorships, no pay-to-play, no exceptions. How we stay independent and how to hold us to it.
Here is the question that decides whether any of this means anything: can a business pay us to rank higher? The answer is no, and it is not a soft no with an asterisk. No business has ever paid for placement on Cityvetted, none ever will, and there is no private menu, no premium tier, no quiet phone call where the rules bend. I am stating it this bluntly because the entire value of a ranking collapses the instant readers suspect it is for sale, and most local ranking sites you have used were, in fact, for sale.
- Businesses cannot buy a higher rank, a better placement, or removal from a list. There is no paid tier that touches the score.
- The people who write our rankings have no idea who, if anyone, is paying us, and that wall is deliberate.
- If we ever earn money from a business we rank, we tell you on the page, in plain language.
How most "best of" lists actually work
You have read a hundred "10 Best Plumbers in Your City" pages. Many of them are advertising wearing the costume of journalism. The ranking is sorted by who paid the most, the "editor's pick" badge is a line item, and nothing on the page tells you. It is legal, it is common, and it is the reason people have stopped trusting these lists at all. We started Cityvetted partly out of irritation with exactly this. A recommendation you can buy is not a recommendation. It is an ad with better manners.
Cityvetted methodology, 2026.
The wall, and how we built it
Independence is not a promise you make. It is a structure you build so the promise cannot be quietly broken. On our side that means a hard separation between whoever brings in revenue and whoever decides the rankings. The editors who write these lists do not see who advertises, do not get asked to adjust a position, and would have no way to act on such a request even if someone made one, because the score comes from the data, not from us.
"A recommendation you can buy is not a recommendation. We built the whole company around refusing to sell ours."
to Maya Hendricks, Home Services EditorSo how do we keep the lights on?
Fair question, and we owe you a straight answer rather than a vague one. We make money in ways that do not touch the ranking: a few clearly marked affiliate links, where we earn a small referral fee that is identical no matter which business you choose, and reader support. The test we hold every revenue idea to is simple. Could it ever change which business we rank first? If the answer is yes, we do not do it. An affiliate fee that pays the same for every option fails to corrupt the ranking precisely because it has no favorite.
What you can hold us to
Trust should be checkable, not just asserted, so here is what we commit to in public. If we ever earn money connected to a business that appears in a ranking, we disclose it on that page, in words a normal person can understand, not buried in a footer. If we get something wrong, we correct it and date the correction. And if a business ever tells you it paid us for its spot, that business is either lying or has been scammed by someone pretending to be us, and either way I want to know.
None of this makes us perfect. We make judgment calls, our data has gaps, and reasonable people will disagree with a ranking now and then. But the one thing we will never do is take money to move a name up the page. That line is the product. Everything else is detail.
If anyone at Cityvetted, including me, ever asks an editor to change a ranking for a paying business, the right response is to refuse and to tell readers. I am writing that down here so it is on the record and so you can hold us to it.