Policy

Disclosures

How paid placements, affiliate links and ads are labeled, and how we keep them from changing what you read.

Last updated Sep 22, 2026

Sponsored listings

A paid listing shows a visible "Sponsored" label on every card and on its page, and its outbound links carry rel="sponsored". Sponsorship buys position only. It does not buy a better description, hidden reviews, a higher rating, or a pass on corrections. A sponsor's listing is verified and moderated exactly like every other listing. If a sponsor asks us to change facts or remove honest reviews, we say no.

In the weekly newsletter, a paid placement is a card labeled "Ad". It shows the business's own logo, which the business agreed to when it bought the ad, and a short description taken from its listing, which we wrote.

Affiliate links

Affiliate links are marked with a note near the link, such as "we may earn a commission." We only use affiliate programs for things we would link to anyway. We do not write content to sell products. Where an affiliate partner and a non-affiliate option both exist, we list both.

Reviews and votes

We follow the FTC's Consumer Reviews and Testimonials rule (16 CFR Part 465). In plain words:

• We never write, buy, or trade for reviews, and we never post reviews under a fake name.
• We do not suppress reviews because they are negative. Positive and negative reviews are moderated by the same rules, which are written down on the moderation policy page.
• Businesses cannot pay to remove or hide a review. Sponsors get no say in moderation.
• We do not show a rating unless it comes from reviews collected on this site under these rules. We never import ratings from other sites.
• Owners and employees may reply to reviews, and the reply is labeled as from the business.

Editorial independence

Listing descriptions are written by software from the facts we store, and checked against them: every name and number in one has to appear in the stored record or the description is rejected and rewritten. Guides are written by hand. Neither is written by the businesses they describe. A claimed listing owner can correct facts (hours, phone, services) and add their own photos, and those changes are reviewed before they go live. No business, sponsor, or agency reviews our guides before publication. We do not accept free meals, tastings, or stays in exchange for coverage; if we ever do, the page will say so.

Not official

Nothing here is official. We are not a town, county, chamber, or agency, and we do not speak for any business. Where we show government data, the agency is the source of truth and is named next to the data.

Data sources and attribution

Business discovery starts from public sources; everything we publish is then checked against the business's own website, a government record, or a visit. We do not use Yelp data, we do not scrape Facebook, and we do not republish other sites' review text, descriptions, or photos. Where we use Google Places, we store only the place identifier, nothing else.

Photos carry a credit and license line where they appear. A business's own photos are used only with the owner's recorded permission from the claim flow.

Photographs and drawings

Every photograph on this site is a real photograph of the thing it is attached to. None is stock, and none is generated. A photo appears on a listing only when we hold one of that specific place, with its source and license recorded, which is why most listings show a mark or a plain panel instead.

Where we hold no photograph, some pages carry a drawing instead. Guides, event pages, category panels and the town and category hubs show a generated illustration: flat color, a skyline, a category symbol. It is drawn by our own code from the page's name, so no two match, and it is deliberately not photographic. It is decoration and orientation, and it is never a depiction of a particular place. If a page shows you a picture of a trail, a building or a view, it is a photograph with a credit under it.

A business's logo may fill the media slot on its own listing when we hold no photograph of it. It is shown contained on a plain background, never cropped to fill, so it reads as a mark rather than a picture of the premises.

Town photos

The photo on each town's tile is a real photograph from a government source or an open license that allows reuse with credit.

Category photos

A few "browse by category" panels on the homepage carry a real, specific Verde Valley photo instead of a generic stock image; the rest use a plain icon.

Topic photos

Category pages and guides show an open-licensed photo of the topic itself, such as a mechanic's shop or a cup of coffee, taken from Wikimedia Commons. These illustrate the kind of business, not any business listed here, and they never appear on a listing page.

Event illustrations

Every event shows an open-licensed photo of what kind of event it is, such as a stack of books for a book drive or a telescope for a star party, taken from Wikimedia Commons. Each one is labelled "Illustration". It is not a photo of that event, its venue, its organizer or the people going.

Listing photos

A listing's photo is real: our own, a government or open-license source with credit stored here, or the owner's own photo added through the claim flow with recorded permission. Never a business's marketing photo pulled from its website, Google, or social media (CLAUDE.md rule 5).

Questions

Email support@verdevalleydirectory.com.