Moderation policy

Every review and report submitted to FranchiseReview.co.uk is checked before it’s published. We’re not checking whether it’s positive or negative — negative reviews are the point of this site. We’re checking whether it’s lawful to publish.

What we publish

• Honest accounts of a reviewer’s own experience as a franchisee.
• Factual claims, where the reviewer can point to a basis for them.
• Clearly-labelled opinion, even strongly worded opinion, about a franchisor’s conduct, support, or business practices.
• Constructive and critical feedback alike.

What we don’t publish

• Specific factual accusations against a named individual (rather than the franchisor company) that we can’t see any basis for.
• Content that’s clearly intended to harass rather than inform.
• Anything unlawful — threats, hate speech, content that breaches a court order, and so on.
• Reviews from someone who can’t reasonably claim to have been a franchisee, prospective franchisee, or directly affected party.

Opinion vs. fact

UK defamation law treats honest opinion differently from factual claims. A reviewer is entitled to say “I think the training was poor and I wouldn’t recommend this franchise” — that’s opinion, and it stays up even if the franchisor strongly disagrees. A reviewer is not entitled to invent a specific, false factual claim (for example, a fabricated allegation of fraud against a named director) — that’s a different matter, and it’s the kind of claim a complaint under our dispute process is designed to catch.

How we calculate the star score

Every brand page shows a star score that starts at a neutral 3 and moves up or down as real reviews come in — the more reviews, the less that starting point matters. This stops a brand’s very first review, good or bad, from displaying as a falsely confident flat score that looks identical to a brand with hundreds of genuine reviews behind it. By around five reviews the effect is barely noticeable; it fades further from there.

This adjustment is applied identically whether reviews are positive or negative — it’s a statistical confidence correction, not a way of softening bad reviews or inflating good ones. The raw, unadjusted average is always shown too, right next to the headline score, whenever the two differ meaningfully. Nothing about this changes what any individual review says, and no franchisor can pay to change it.

Verified vs. all reviews

Anyone can write a review without proving anything beyond having a verified email address. Some reviewers go further and prove they’re a genuine franchisee of the specific brand they’re reviewing — a signed page of their franchise agreement, a letter from the franchisor addressed to them, or a utility bill in the franchise’s trading name at their unit’s address. We check that proof by hand, then delete the document itself the moment we decide — we only keep a permanent record that verification was requested and approved or rejected, never the document.

Verified status is scoped to that one brand. Someone verified for Brand A can’t review Brand B as verified — they’d need to prove that separately. Every brand page shows two scores side by side so readers can judge for themselves how much weight to give each: a verified-franchisees score and an all-reviews score. Neither replaces the other.

If your review isn’t published

We’ll tell you why, and where possible, what you’d need to change. Most rejections are about specificity — naming an individual with an unsupported accusation, rather than describing your own experience.