How LocallyIrish.ie lists and ranks businesses

Listings are built from four kinds of source:

• Public business data — business details published through Google, OpenStreetMap and the Companies Registration Office (CRO).
• Business owners — owners add new listings and claim existing ones. New listings are reviewed by our team before they go live.
• Visitors — anyone can suggest a missing business or an edit to an existing one. Suggestions are checked before they change a listing.
• Our own checks — we remove duplicates, closed businesses and listings that are not real local businesses.

Once an owner claims a listing, the owner's own details take priority over imported data.

Where a business has not written its own description, we may generate a short one, plus common questions and answers, with the help of AI. That text is written only from the listing's own details (its category, location, services and hours) and is checked against them. It never adds reviews, prices or claims the listing does not support.

Owners can replace any generated text with their own at any time from their dashboard.

Category and county pages (for example, plumbers in Sligo) are ordered as follows:

1. Sponsored businesses first, in a clearly labelled block (see below).
2. Then paid plans — Platinum, then Premium — which are also labelled.
3. Then everyone else by a weighted rating: a business's rating counts for more the more reviews stand behind it, so 4.8 stars from 300 reviews ranks above 5.0 from 2. Businesses without ratings follow.

“Best of” pages rank on rating alone. They use the same weighted rating, and paying for a plan cannot move a business up a Best-of list. A plan only decides the order between two businesses whose ratings are exactly equal.

Businesses can pay to be more visible. Whenever they do, we say so on the page:

• Sponsored businesses appear in a gold block marked “Sponsored” above the regular results. At most three show on any page. If more have paid, they take turns through the day.
• Premium and Platinum listings rank above free ones and carry a label or highlighted row.

Payment never changes a business's rating, its reviews or its position in a Best-of ranking. Businesses cannot pay to remove or hide reviews.

Reviews written on LocallyIrish.ie are moderated before they are published. We remove reviews that are fake, abusive or not about a real experience. We also discount reviews sent through VPNs or proxy services when calculating a business's Trust Score.

Where a business shows a Google rating, it comes from Google and is labelled as such. Owners can reply to reviews, but they cannot edit or remove them.

If something on a listing is wrong, use “Suggest an edit” on the listing or email hello@locallyirish.ie. Business owners can claim their listing to correct it directly, or ask for it to be removed.

We fix clear factual errors as soon as we can.