How we verify

A business earns Verified Rug Specialist only when we have found and recorded published evidence for all four criteria below. If any one of them is missing, the entry shows Listed and no badge is issued. There is no middle grade and nothing can be bought.

The four criteria

#	Criterion	What counts as evidence
C1	Own facility	The business's own site shows or describes its washing plant or workshop, or an association listing names the facility
C2	In-plant or immersion wash	An explicit description of washing off-site in their facility. "On-site rug cleaning" alone does not qualify
C3	Fine-rug handling	An explicit mention of Persian, Oriental, wool, silk or antique rug care
C4	Confirmed location	An address or service city stated on their own site, consistent with the metro area

Every piece of evidence is stored as three things: which criterion it supports, the URL it came from, and a short note on what the source actually says. All three appear on the public verification record, so you can check our reading of it yourself.

The additional repair badge

Verified Repair Specialist requires all four criteria above plus recorded evidence of repair work: reweaving, fringe work, binding or patching. It is a separate badge, not a higher grade of the first one. A business can be a verified specialist without doing repairs, and that is not a mark against it.

Where evidence comes from

Two places only:

1. The business's own website.
2. Public association membership pages, such as the WoolSafe Organisation's service-provider index, the Association of Rug Care Specialists, or IICRC certification listings.

We do not build entries from Google, Yelp, Thumbtack, Angi or BBB. Their terms prohibit it, and second-hand aggregated data is exactly the problem this registry exists to solve.

We also do not copy text from a business's website. Descriptions on this site are written in our own words from what we read.

What we deliberately do not do

• No invented data. If we could not find a phone number, address, certification or service on a business's own site, the field is left empty rather than filled with a guess. An empty field on this site means "we did not find it", never "it does not exist".
• No contact without consent. We have not emailed, called or filled in the contact form of any business listed here. Entries are built from published sources only.
• No tenure claims. This registry was established in 2026. It has no decades of experience and does not pretend to.
• No paid placement. Position on a metro page is verified-first, then alphabetical. Money cannot change it.

Last checked, and re-verification

Every entry records the date its evidence was last confirmed. That date is published on the listing and on the verification record.

Verification is re-checked annually. If a year lapses without re-verification, the badge moves to a lapsed state: the badge image served from this domain is replaced with a neutral mark reading "Verification not current", and the verification record is updated to match. Because businesses hotlink the image, this happens on their site too, without anyone needing to remember.

Revocation

A verification is revoked when any of these becomes true:

• The evidence for a criterion is withdrawn, contradicted or no longer published.
• The business stops operating its own facility, or closes.
• The badge is altered, used by another business, or used with keyword-stuffed anchor text contrary to the badge terms.

Revocation replaces the badge files with the neutral mark and updates the verification record. We do not quietly delete the record, because a verification that can vanish without trace is not worth anything.

Corrections

If we have got something wrong — and on a dataset built from reading websites, we will have — tell us. The corrections form goes straight to us. A business can also ask to be removed entirely, and we will remove it without conditions.