1. What a star rating is
A practice's headline star rating is the arithmetic mean of all reviews that meet all three of the following criteria at the moment you view the page:
- Passed human moderation and is currently published.
- Not currently under active investigation or dispute.
- Not marked as excluded for rating-integrity reasons (see section 3).
The rating is rounded to one decimal place. The number of reviews shown next to the rating is the number of reviews included in that calculation.
2. What is excluded from ratings
- Reviews awaiting moderation.
- Reviews held pending evidence.
- Reviews under active dispute where the allegation is serious.
- Reviews removed for breaching the Review Rules — these are removed from the calculation retrospectively.
- Reviews we have identified as fake, incentivised, coordinated (review bombing), duplicated, or written by a person with an undisclosed conflict of interest.
Redacted reviews (where personal data was removed but the underlying review remains genuine and lawful) do still count.
3. Rating integrity protections
- Spike detection. A sudden influx of hostile or laudatory reviews triggers a temporary hold and case review before those reviews affect the public score.
- Retrospective correction. If a review is later removed as fake or unlawful, it is removed from the rating going forward and historically.
- No paid ranking. We do not sell ranking prominence in search or category listings. Rankings are driven only by review-based signals.
- Advertising separation. Where advertising appears on the site it is clearly labelled and is separated from review-driven rankings.
- Ownership change notices. Where a practice has changed hands or management, we may flag historic reviews with a context notice.
4. How reviews are ordered on a listing
By default, individual reviews on a practice page are ordered newest first. You can re-sort by rating or oldest first. We do not hide negative reviews or push them below positive ones by default.
5. How search rankings work
Search results order practices by relevance to your query (location, species, service). Where two results are equally relevant, we tie-break using published review count and average rating. Compare-Vets does not accept payment to move any practice up the rankings.
6. Historic and outdated reviews
Every review carries the date of visit and the date of publication so you can weigh recent experience against older experience. Reviews are retained indefinitely unless removed under the Review Rules or a valid deletion request.
7. What we do not do
- We do not include unpublished, pending or removed reviews in the public rating.
- We do not weight reviews by whether the practice pays us.
- We do not use AI-generated summaries that imply verification we have not carried out.
- We do not silently manipulate a rating without a documented moderation decision.
8. Questions
If you believe a rating is inaccurate or has been distorted, email moderation@compare-vets.org — see the Complaints & Takedown Policy.