How to dispute a score

This page sets out who may dispute a published score, what counts as a disputable factual input, how to submit a dispute, and what happens after you do.

Any party who believes a factual input to a published score is wrong may raise a dispute — an operator, a member of the public, a regulator, or a consumer named in a review. You do not need to be the brand being scored to raise a dispute; you need a specific, checkable claim about the facts we used.

Disputable: a wrong licence status, a review misattributed to the wrong brand, an incorrect ownership or operator link, or any other factual input our methodology consumes. If the fact is wrong, the input is wrong, regardless of which way it moved the score.

Not disputable through this process: the score value itself, and the choice of methodology — a weight, a formula, a half-life. Scores change only through the published methodology, not through a request to reconsider a number. Disputes about the methodology itself are routed to the public methodology changelog at /changelog; no methodology change is made without a versioned entry.

Submit a dispute via our contact form using the «Dispute a factual record» category. State the specific factual input you believe is wrong and, where you have one, the evidence supporting the correction. Resolutions that result in a score change, a published correction, or a methodology clarification are logged in our public dispute register at /policies/disputes.

• On receipt. The specific factual input under dispute is flagged and held pending review — it is not treated as verified while the dispute is open.
• Acknowledgement. Substantiated disputes are acknowledged within 14 calendar days.
• Gate review. We check whether correcting the disputed input would trip a pre-existing methodology gate — one that already exists in the published methodology, not one written in response to the dispute.
• Recompute. If a factual input is corrected, the affected score is recomputed at the next scheduled recompute, using the current methodology version. We do not make an unscheduled methodology change in reaction to a dispute.

Every substantiated dispute resolves to exactly one of three outcomes. All three are audit-logged.

A low score is never voluntarily withdrawn under legal pressure. Scores change only through the published methodology.

For the reviews-handling policy this dispute path also serves, see /policies/reviews. For the public log of resolved disputes, see /policies/disputes. For what happens when a rated brand fails rather than when we get a fact wrong, see /methodology/when-we-are-wrong.