The rules
How we verify
What a badge on this site is allowed to mean, and what it is not. The product promise lives in this wording — a badge that meant “we like them” would make us the thing we are trying not to be.
The short version
Every requirement cites a government source, with the date we read it. Every company listing shows what we could establish and, just as plainly, what we could not. Nothing here is a recommendation, and nobody has paid to appear.
The licensed badge is a fact a government published. “Their website says” is the company describing itself. If those two ever swap, the page is lying.
When we say licensed
Hood cleaning is licensed as its own trade in three states: Utah, Nevada and Massachusetts. A company on Utah’s published list had to pass a criminal background check and show the State Fire Marshal proof of public liability insurance. That is a different order of claim from “fully insured” in a website footer, and it is the only time this site uses the licensed badge.
Most of the country does not license the trade at all. Fire-equipment permits exist in some of those states — they cover the suppression system inside the hood, not the cleaning of it. We do not describe a fire-equipment permit as a hood-cleaning licence.
When we say their website says
We read a company’s own site and record the claims it makes, with the sentence each one came from. Memberships, certifications, years in business: those are the company talking. We reproduce the sentence so you can judge it. We have not independently confirmed it.
A dead, parked or missing website is noted as such. That is not a mark against the company — plenty of good trade businesses run on a phone — but it is the end of what we can tell you from public sources.