Frequently Asked Questions

Trust Duck is an independent business verification platform. Businesses are listed with public information, and businesses that go through verification receive a Trust Duck Score from 0 to 100, built from third-party review ratings, LinkedIn, Maps listings, web presence, press coverage, Wikipedia/Wikidata presence and a human review.

A 0–100 rating of how well a business can be verified from independent signals. Up to 90 points come from automated and AI-assisted checks: external review ratings (Trustpilot, Clutch, G2), LinkedIn, Maps listing, HTTPS and domain age, profile completeness, press coverage and Wikipedia/Wikidata presence. Up to 15 more come from a human review of incorporation status and business practices. The total is capped at 100.

Trust Duck was built by Philip Cripe of CripeHub Solutions. It grew out of frustration at watching consumers and investors get burned by businesses that misrepresented themselves.

Browsing listings and scores, submitting a business, and claiming your own profile are all free. Getting a Trust Duck Score requires a Standard subscription ($20/month or $220/year), which pays for the AI verification and human review. Unclaimed profiles may show advertising, which helps fund the platform.

No. Trust Duck is independent. We read publicly available ratings from those platforms as one signal among several, and have no commercial relationship with them.

No. A subscription is required for a business to be scored at all, because it pays for the verification work, but it does not decide the result. The score comes from what the checks and the human reviewer actually find. A subscribed business with weak or unverifiable signals gets a low score, and a flagged business can be scored zero.

Trustpilot collects customer reviews on its own site. Trust Duck does not host reviews. It combines ratings from several review platforms (including Trustpilot) with LinkedIn, Maps, domain, press and Wikipedia/Wikidata signals, screens against international sanctions lists, and adds a human review, to produce a single verification score.

Yes. Any business with a website can be listed, wherever it is based. Location (city, region, country) is used for the ranking pages and does not affect the score.

All of them. Businesses choose from preset categories such as Web3, Fintech, AI, SaaS, eCommerce, Marketing and Consulting, or add their own.

Automated and AI-assisted signals (up to 90 points): external reviews up to 47, LinkedIn up to 11, Maps listing up to 8, web presence (HTTPS and domain age) up to 7, profile completeness up to 7, press coverage up to 5, and Wikipedia/Wikidata presence up to 5. Human review (up to 15 points): incorporation status up to 3 and legal and ethical business practices up to 12. The total is capped at 100.

A platform counts once it has enough reviews: 5 or more on Trustpilot or Clutch, 3 or more on G2. The ratings of qualifying platforms are averaged, weighted by review count, and converted to points: 4.5 or higher earns 47, 4.0 or higher earns 38, 3.5 or higher earns 26, and anything lower earns 14. If no platform has enough reviews yet, each confirmed review-platform profile earns 5 points, up to 20.

Follower counts for the company page and the founder are added together: 10,000 or more earns 11 points, 5,000 or more earns 8, 2,000 or more earns 5, and any confirmed followers earn 2. A valid LinkedIn URL on its own earns 3.

A confirmed Google or Apple Maps listing that has reviews earns 8 points. A confirmed listing without reviews earns 5. A Maps link that could not be confirmed earns 4, and an address with no Maps link earns 2.

A live HTTPS website earns 3 points. Domain age is looked up through RDAP, the public registration database: 10 or more years earns 4 points, 5 or more earns 3, 2 or more earns 2, and 1 or more earns 1. The web presence total is capped at 7.

Eight items: company name, website, description, founder name, contact email, LinkedIn URL, Maps URL, and at least one review platform URL. Each one filled in counts toward the 7-point maximum.

We search worldwide news for the business name and count distinct outlets. Articles on the business’s own website do not count. 5 or more outlets earns 5 points, 3–4 earns 3, and 1–2 earns 1.

We look the business up on Wikidata and only accept an entry whose official website matches the business’s domain, which avoids mix-ups between similarly named companies. A matching Wikidata entry earns 3 points, and an English Wikipedia article as well brings it to 5.

After the automated checks, a reviewer confirms whether the business is properly incorporated (up to 3 points) and whether there is evidence of legal and ethical business practices (up to 12 points). The score becomes official once this review is complete.

100 is Perfect, 90–99 Excellent, 75–89 Strong, 50–74 Good, 31–49 Fair, and 30 or below Limited. Profiles that have not been verified show “Not Analyzed Yet”, or “Claimed” if the owner has claimed them for free, instead of a score.

Profiles flagged for sanctions, terrorism, fraud or scams, or as an unverifiable risk have their score set to zero, and a warning is shown on the profile. A profile under investigation has its score hidden until the review is finished. Suspicious jumps in review counts on external platforms can lead to a profile being flagged for review manipulation.

Not directly, but a new business cannot yet earn domain age points, and it usually has fewer reviews and less press coverage. As those build up, its score can rise when it is re-verified.

Yes. Everything on this page, and the full breakdown at trustduck.click/how-we-score, describes how points are awarded. Each scored profile also shows its own breakdown.

Go to trustduck.click/submit. You need an account with a verified email address. A name, website and description are required, and you can add up to 3 categories, location, LinkedIn, Maps and review platform links.

No. Anyone with a verified account can add a business. Only the owner can claim it, edit it, or have it verified and scored.

The listing goes live straight away at trustduck.click/business/[name], marked “Not Analyzed Yet”. Nothing is scored at this stage. The business can then be claimed by its owner.

Only verified businesses are scored. A listing shows “Not Analyzed Yet” until it is claimed and verified through a Standard subscription, so there is never a misleading low score on a business nobody has checked.

Use the search on the home page or browse trustduck.click/rankings. If it is there, you can claim it instead of adding it again.

Yes, listings are open to anyone. Adding false information breaks our Terms of Service, and only the real owner can claim and manage the profile.

Open your business’s page and click Claim. You need to be signed in, and your account’s email address must be on the same domain as the business website (for example you@yourcompany.com for yourcompany.com).

A free claim confirms you own the business and lets you edit the listing. It does not score the profile: the listing shows “Claimed” until you subscribe for verification.

Standard costs $20/month or $220/year. It runs the full AI-assisted verification, followed by a mandatory human review, and the profile receives an official Trust Duck Score (up to 100). Once verified, you can embed a live score badge on your own website. You can pay by card through Stripe or with PayPal.

The automated and AI-assisted checks usually take a few minutes. The profile then waits for the human review, and the score becomes official when that review is complete. Before payment, every business is screened against international sanctions lists.

Not for new customers. Premium was an earlier, higher-priced tier. Some older accounts still hold it, but Standard is now the only tier on offer and can reach the full 100 points.

Card subscriptions renew automatically. For other payment methods we email reminders 7 days and 3 days before the subscription expires. If it lapses, you keep your free ownership claim and can still edit the listing, but the profile is no longer scored and shows “Claimed” until you subscribe again.

Your claim stays as long as the profile complies with our Terms of Service. It can be removed if the profile contains false information or the claim was obtained fraudulently.

Once your profile is verified, the owner area of your business page has ready-made badge code (an image, a live widget, or Markdown) to paste into your website. The badge links to your profile and updates when your score changes.

A score is calculated when verification runs after subscribing, finalised by the human review, and recalculated whenever our team re-verifies the profile, including refreshing external review ratings for active subscribers. If your situation has changed, ask for a re-verification through the support form.

No. Trust Duck does not host its own reviews. The score uses ratings from established review platforms instead, so it cannot be inflated with fake accounts created on our site.

The overall rating and review count from Trustpilot, Clutch and G2 are shown on a scored profile. Individual reviews are not reproduced.

Report it to the platform that hosts it, since Trust Duck does not host or moderate those reviews. If you believe a whole profile on Trust Duck is misleading or fraudulent, signed-in users can report it from the business page.

Trust Duck uses Anthropic’s Claude with web search to check LinkedIn follower counts, look for red flags and write the verification notes on each profile. Domain age, HTTPS, Maps and review-platform link checks, press coverage and Wikidata lookups are direct technical checks that do not use AI.

Yes. It can miss data when a site blocks automated access or search results are ambiguous. That is why the technical checks are done without AI wherever possible, and why every paid verification also goes through a human review before the score is official.

The US OFAC SDN list, the UN Security Council consolidated list, the EU financial sanctions list, the UK OFSI list, the Swiss SECO list and Canada’s consolidated list. The lists are refreshed monthly, and every business is screened before a verification payment is accepted.

Verification is not processed, and the profile can be flagged with its score set to zero and a warning shown publicly. Flagged profiles are not removed, because the warning is part of the public record. If you believe a match is a false positive, contact us through the Legal form.

Yes. Scores are public. Please attribute them to “Trust Duck Score” and link to the company’s profile page. Scores reflect the data available at the time and can change.

Every point comes from a documented signal, and each scored profile shows its breakdown. The domain, HTTPS, review-platform, Wikidata and press checks all use public sources you can check yourself.

Not by a third party at this stage. The scoring method is published in full so it can be checked independently.

No score is a guarantee. A high score means the business has strong, independently verifiable signals and passed a human review. Use it as one data point among several.

Use the support form at the bottom of this page, or the Support and Legal forms at trustduck.click/legal.

Yes. GET /api/companies supports search, category, location, min_score, claimed, limit (up to 50) and offset parameters, and returns JSON, plain text (?format=text) or CSV (?format=csv). No API key is needed. Requests are rate-limited.

Yes. GET /api/companies/[slug] returns the full profile, including the score breakdown for scored companies, external review data, verification notes, and LinkedIn and Maps status.

Yes, at trustduck.click/llms.txt. It describes the platform, scoring method and API in a format designed for language models.

Yes. Every business page includes schema.org JSON-LD (Organization, breadcrumbs and score details), and verified profiles also include their rating. This helps search engines and AI assistants read the data correctly.

Yes, for a few minutes: company responses are sent with Cache-Control max-age=300. Fetch again before publishing or acting on a score.

Yes, subject to our Terms of Service and with attribution to Trust Duck. For commercial use, please contact us first.

If you create an account: your email address, display name, a securely hashed password or your Google sign-in, and your avatar if you add one. If you add a business: the information you provide. We do not sell personal data. Details are in the Privacy Policy at trustduck.click/legal/privacy.

Yes, through the support form. We review every request. If a listing was added by someone else and the information is accurate public business information, we may keep it.

Send a request through the Legal form at trustduck.click/legal. We will delete your account and personal data, or provide a copy, as data protection law (including GDPR) requires. Business listings remain as public business information.

Do not submit false information, impersonate a business you do not represent, or use the platform to harass or defame anyone. The full terms are at trustduck.click/legal/terms.