Review Integrity Policy

Every listing is a paying advertiser

Bakersfield Home Magazine is a directory of local businesses that advertise with us. Every company you see here is a paid advertiser. We are transparent about that relationship: a business's advertising tier can affect where its listing is placed, but it never affects whether — or how — reviews of that business are shown. We do not present advertising-influenced ordering as if it were a merit ranking.

Who can write a review

To submit a review you must confirm a working email address and attest that you are a real customer of the business and that you are not an owner, employee, relative, or competitor of it. We do not publish reviews written by a business about itself, by its staff or relatives, or generated by artificial intelligence. Your display name and city are shown with your review; your email address is never shared with the business.

The "Verified customer" badge

A review marked Verified customer came from a customer the business invited to review it through our platform, using an invitation link tied to that person's email. All other reviews are labeled Unverified. Businesses invite customers using a generalized tool — they cannot pick which customers to invite based on how happy those customers are, and they cannot preview, approve, gate, or suppress a review before or after it is written. The badge tells you only that the reviewer was a business-invited customer; it is not an endorsement of the review's content and says nothing about the rating.

What we screen for — our published criteria

Every review is checked by a person before it publishes, usually within two business days. We screen only against the fixed, published criteria below, applied equally to all reviews without regard to sentiment. A review is rejected or removed only if it:

• Reveals confidential or trade-secret information.
• Is defamatory, harassing, abusive, or obscene.
• Shares another person's personal information or likeness.
• Contains discriminatory content.
• Is clearly false or misleading.
• Is reasonably believed to be fake.
• Is wholly unrelated to this business's products or services.

A review is never rejected, hidden, delayed, down-weighted, or removed because of its star rating or because it is negative. "The customer is wrong" or "the review is unfair" is not one of our criteria and is not grounds for removal. Photos attached to a review are held to the same criteria (and we strip location metadata from them before storing them). We log every accept and reject decision with its reason, so our moderation can be shown to be applied uniformly.

Ratings and how they are combined

Reviews default to newest-first; you can re-sort by highest or lowest rating. A business's overall rating is the plain average of all its published reviews, shown with the total count and a breakdown by star level. We do not filter, weight, or hide any published review from that average based on sentiment, and we never import reviews from other sites into a business's rating on Bakersfield Home Magazine.

Business responses

A business may post one public response per review, shown as "Response from [Business]". The same content criteria above apply to responses. A business cannot edit, hide, or remove the review it is responding to.

Flagging and disputes

If a business believes a review violates the criteria above, it can flag the review and must give a specific reason. The review stays visible while we investigate. We remove a flagged review only if it actually violates one of our published criteria or is verified to be fake; we notify the reviewer of the outcome. Disagreeing with a review, or believing it is unfair, is not a basis for removal. Businesses have no ability to take a review down themselves, and we never send unfounded legal threats to reviewers.

To report a review, correct or delete your own review, or ask a question about this policy, email [email protected]. Reviews that are rejected or later removed are retained, unpublished, together with the moderation decision, so we can document that our criteria are applied consistently. For how we collect and use the information you provide, see our Privacy Policy.