Reviews and takedown
Where a rating on Affirmat comes from, why it cannot be filtered, and how a record is challenged.
Status
Draft structure, not in force. The facts below are how the system is built and were checked on 11 September 2026. The takedown procedure and the response times have not been drafted.
Not open yet
Affirmat is opening in Ireland first, and it is not open yet. Nothing on this site can be signed into, searched or put up today.
There is no waiting list and no sign-up: this page asks for nothing, not even an email address. It is here so what is being built can be read and held to.
Everything below is built and tested. None of it has yet met a phone network, a customer or a bill.
A review comes only from a customer whose job was confirmed
A rating exists only against a job that a business created — or accepted from a quote request — and that the customer then confirmed. There is no free-standing review form anywhere on Affirmat, and there is no way to reach one.
This is not a rule that is applied afterwards. There is no reviews table and no ratings table in the database. The only place a rating can exist is the confirmation on a job, one confirmation per job, and a rating without a job cannot be recorded at all.
A business cannot confirm its own work. The contact that confirms is checked against the business’s own numbers and addresses, and a match disqualifies the confirmation. One contact can confirm the same business at most 3 times in twelve months, and at most 6 times across all businesses.
A review cannot be filtered before it is published
Every confirmation channel — a text, an email, a job QR code or a counter QR code — lands on the same page with the same four ratings: quality, tidiness, communication and price. The channel records which door the customer came through and nothing else. It does not change the form.
A business never sees a rating before it is public, cannot choose which customers are asked, and cannot hold a rating back. There is no approval step and no queue. A confirmation link is live for 30 days after the job is marked done. A business can resend it at most 3 times, no sooner than 48 hours apart — and a resend goes to the same customer with the same form.
A business’s confirmation rate is always shown beside its job count. A business that only asks the customers it expects to be happy has a visibly poor rate, rather than an invisibly good one.
Bad news is shown, not hidden
Snags still open after 30 days, missed callbacks, and disputes together with the business’s reply all appear on the public page. A business cannot switch that off.
Rank is never paid
Every results page carries this line: Ranked by confirmed jobs near you. Rank is never paid.
Ranking takes four inputs and no others: confirmed jobs weighted by how close they were to the searcher, a confirmation ratio, a rating mean, and how recent the work is. It is the same calculation for every searcher, is not personalised, and has no commercial input of any kind. There are no featured listings, no boosts and no sponsored results. Businesses never pay to be listed, to be found, or for a lead.
The inputs behind a result are stored with it, so a business that asks why it was placed where it was can be told.
Not drafted
[FOR SOLICITOR: whether the disclosure line above satisfies the ranking transparency requirement of the Consumer Rights Act 2022, and whether the steps taken to verify that reviews come from real customers need describing here in more detail than the two sections above. See section 8 of the solicitor brief]
Challenging a record
A customer or a business can raise a dispute on a job. The other side may reply, and both the statement and the reply are published. A dispute ends in exactly one of three ways:
- Stands
- The record and its verification stay as they are.
- Verification removed
- The job stays on the ledger but loses its confirmed standing, and stops counting.
- Job removed
- The job comes off the public ledger entirely.
Ledger numbers are computed from the records and cannot be edited by hand by anyone, including staff. A dispute resolved by a person is the only mechanism that can change what a page says.
Not drafted
[FOR SOLICITOR: the takedown procedure in full: who may request removal of a confirmation, a comment or a photograph; what evidence is required; the response time; the appeal route; and what is published about a removal afterwards]
Not drafted
[FOR SOLICITOR: the defamation position on the free text one party writes about another — a confirmation comment, a dispute statement and a business reply are all published — and what notice-and-takedown obligation attaches to each]
Detecting faked work
Photographs reused across jobs are detected by perceptual hash. Captures outside the job window or away from the job location are flagged, as are repeated use of the same customer contact and unusual volume. Two upheld photograph-reuse findings suspend a business, as does a dispute resolved as the work not having happened.
Reporting a trader who is not on Affirmat
A report about a trader with no job on Affirmat goes to moderation and nowhere else. It is never published, never counted into any rating, and never affects search order. That separation is enforced in the database rather than left to care.