Editorial policy

There are two kinds of content on LocalsKnow and they are held to different standards. Listing data is factual, sourced and dated, and it is governed by the data and corrections policy. Editorial is guides, curated lists, tools and the wire, and it is governed by this page.

Who writes it

Editorial is written by people at Automatrix Digital and by local writers commissioned for a specific region or trade. Every guide carries a named author and their role at the top of the page. There are no house bylines, no "LocalsKnow Team" credits and no pen names. If you want to know who told you a plumber in Wagga charges what they charge, the page says.

Writers are paid for the work, per piece or per hour. They are never paid by a business that appears in the piece, and a writer with a commercial relationship to a business does not write about that business or its direct competitors. Where a writer has a personal connection to a subject, such as membership of a club being covered, it is disclosed on the page.

Dates on every page

Each guide shows two dates: when it was first published and when it was last reviewed. These are different things and the site does not blur them. A page reviewed and left unchanged still gets a new review date, because "we checked this and it still holds" is information a reader wants.

• Six month review cycle. Every guide, tool page and curated list is reopened at least every six months and either confirmed, updated or retired.
• Out of cycle review whenever something underneath it moves: a licensing rule changes, a state register changes its search, a price band shifts, or the New South Wales and Victorian public holiday calendars diverge in a way that affects a page about opening hours.
• Retirement means the page stays at its URL with the content rewritten or a pointer to what replaced it. It never means a deletion.

How curated lists are chosen

Curated lists are opinionated on purpose. A list called "best pubs with a beer garden in Albury" is useless if it contains every pub in Albury. Selection works like this:

1. Start from every listing in the relevant category and locality, including the ones that reach it from across the border.
2. Apply the criterion in the title against the listing data, then against the business’s own published material, then against a visit or a phone call where the criterion is not checkable any other way.
3. Rank by the criterion, not by quality score, review count or anything commercial. The order is a judgement and the page says who made it.
4. Write a specific reason for each entry. If the reason could be copied to any other entry on the list, the entry comes off.
5. Publish with the author, the date and a review date.

Inclusion cannot be bought. Not with advertising spend, not with a subscription, not with a link, not with a free meal or a comped room. Businesses are not told they are being considered and do not see the piece before it runs. A business that asks to be added is told to read this paragraph. Removal from a list is not for sale either: a business that wants out of a list can have its listing removed from the directory entirely, and that request is honoured, but it cannot buy a rewrite.

Where AI is used, and where it is not

This is stated plainly because most sites will not state it at all.

• Used for: research, gathering and summarising source material, first drafts, restructuring, and checking a draft for internal contradictions.
• Not used for: publishing. Nothing goes live straight from a model.
• Every published fact is checked by a person against a source. A price, a licence class, an opening time, a distance, a claim about what a business offers. If a fact cannot be traced to a source a human opened, it is cut from the draft rather than softened with "generally" or "typically".
• Quotes and reviews are never generated. A quote in a guide came out of a real conversation and is attributed. Review text on a listing is written by the person who left it.
• Statistics are computed, not written. The data block on a category page is generated from that page’s own listing rows. Every number on it can be checked by counting the cards above it.

The named author on a page is the person who did the checking, and they own what it says. "The model wrote it" has never been an acceptable answer to a correction and never will be.

Corrections

Getting something wrong is normal. Leaving it wrong is not.

• Acknowledged within two business days, by a person.
• Resolved within five business days: fixed, or explained with the source we relied on so you can tell us what is wrong with it.
• Noted on the page with the date, where the change alters a fact a reader could have acted on. Silent edits are for typos, not for numbers.
• Escalated to a full review of the piece if the same page draws two corrections in six months, because that is a sign the sourcing was weak rather than unlucky.

Report one through the corrections form or by email to hello@localsknow.com.au. No account is needed and you do not have to be connected to the business.

Pages are never deleted

This is the standing rule and it overrides the rest. A page that has ever ranked, ever been linked to, or ever been printed on a business card does not get deleted and does not get a 404.

• A category page that drops below 3 listings goes noindex, follow. It keeps its URL and its outbound links, and it flips back to indexed automatically when the count crosses the threshold again.
• A business that closes keeps its page, marked closed, with a link to the category it sat in. Somebody is still searching for it and telling them what happened is better than an error.
• A listing that is merged or renamed gets a permanent redirect from the old URL. The redirect is kept indefinitely.
• A guide that is superseded is rewritten in place, or redirected to the guide that replaced it. It is never quietly removed.

Independence

Advertisers have no input into editorial and no advance notice of it. Advertising is labelled, boxed and excluded from the structured data, which is set out in the advertising policy. Nobody at Automatrix Digital holds an ownership interest in a business listed on the site. If that ever changes, the affected listings will carry a disclosure and this page will say so.

Coverage is limited to New South Wales and Victoria and expands region by region. A town without a page is a town we have not reached, not a judgement about the businesses in it.