How reviews work here

The rules

What counts as a verified review?
One left by a homeowner whose service request went through this platform and reached a completed job. The review is tied to that job record, which is what makes the word 'verified' mean something rather than being decoration. A review that cannot be tied to a job does not get published as verified.
Who can leave one?
Only that homeowner. There is no open submission form, because an open form is how review sections fill up with people who were never customers. Service professionals in the network cannot leave reviews, cannot leave them on each other, and cannot leave them for themselves.
Is the review about VIO or about the company that did the work?
Both, and the distinction matters. VIO refers; an independent local company performs the work. A review reflects the whole experience — how the match went and how the visit went — and the on-site part is the independent company's. We do not present a review of a good visit as evidence that VIO did the work.
How is the rating calculated?
A plain mean of the star ratings on published reviews. No weighting toward recent ones, no dropping of low scores, no adjustment for which company was matched. If we ever change the calculation this page changes with it.
Do reviews get moderated?
They are checked before publishing, and only for two things: that the job record exists, and that the text contains no personal information, no abuse and nothing defamatory. A review is never held back or edited for being negative.
Do negative reviews stay up?
Yes. A one-star review with a real job behind it is published the same as a five-star one, and it stays. It also becomes a complaint on that company's record, which is the part that actually changes anything — a pattern of them ends a pro's place in the network.
Can a service professional delete a review about them?
No. They cannot delete, edit, hide or suppress one, and they cannot pay to have one removed. They can respond to it, and they can raise a factual dispute with us, which we look into on the record.
Are any of the reviews shown here incentivised?
No. We do not offer discounts, refunds, entries or gifts in exchange for a review, and we do not ask only the happy customers. Incentivised reviews are the ordinary way an average rating drifts upward without anyone technically lying, which is why the answer is no rather than 'rarely'.

On the record

What we got wrong, and fixed

This site previously advertised “12.7K verified reviews” while the database held eight rows — every one of them flagged internally as illustrative, with an invented name and a generated photograph — and the setting that gates those rows was switched on, so they were being served to the public as customer reviews.

Both are off. The illustrative rows are gated behind a flag that is off in production, the headline figure is stored rather than displayed and returns only when there is something real to declare, and the review components render nothing at zero instead of “0 verified reviews”. Writing this down is cheaper than being asked about it later, and a methodology page that omits the one time the method failed is not a methodology page.

Structured data

No review stars in our structured data

We do not emit aggregateRating on the organization in our JSON-LD. Rating markup that a business applies to itself is self-serving, Google says so plainly, and the only reason to add it is to try to pull stars into a search result. If reviews are ever attached to the individual companies doing the work, the rating belongs to that entity — not to the platform that made the referral.

Something look wrong here? Email legal@viochimney.com. How the referral itself works is at how it works, and the wider content rules are in our editorial policy.

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