Trust
How verification works
A badge is only worth what it costs to get. This page is the whole standard: what we check before a business can call itself Verified on MarkhamBusiness, how long that lasts, and what makes us take it back.
Three tiers, and only one you can buy
Listed is free and automatic — every business in the directory has it. It says we have a record of you and nothing more.
Verified is a paid annual membership, but paying is not what earns it: the four checks below do. A business that pays and fails a check does not get the badge, and gets its money back.
Award Winner cannot be bought at any price. It comes from the annual Markham Business Awards and is set by our awards process, never by a payment. Anyone offering to sell you one is not us.
The four checks
Confirmed business address
We mail a code to the address on the listing, or accept a utility bill in the business name. A mailbox that never answers is not an address.
Ontario registration lookup
The operating name is matched against the Ontario business registry. A business trading under a name it has not registered does not pass.
A phone that gets answered
We call the listed number during the hours the listing claims to be open, and someone at the business picks up.
Claimed, complete profile
The owner has claimed the listing and filled it in — hours, contact details, description. Verified means someone is accountable for what it says.
Which of these a given business passed is printed on its own listing page, under “Verified business”. If a check is not on file, the listing says so.
Expiry and revocation
Verification runs for twelve months and then has to be re-earned. The badge carries the year (2026) for exactly this reason — a stale badge is visibly stale.
Because the badge image is served from our servers rather than handed over as a file, we do not have to ask anyone to take it down. When a badge is revoked, every site displaying it switches to the expired version on its next refresh, within the hour.
We revoke for:
- A substantiated fraud report from a customer
- The business has closed or moved out of the area
- Fake or incentivised reviews traced back to the business
- Non-renewal — verification lapses after twelve months
Every revocation is logged with a reason, and the business sees that reason in their dashboard. If you think we got it wrong, tell us — decisions get reviewed by a person.
Reporting a badge that looks wrong
If you see our badge on a site and doubt it, click it. A real badge links to that business's listing on markhambusiness.com and shows its checks. A badge that is a flat image, links nowhere, or points at another domain is not ours — report it.
For business owners: putting it on your site
Your badge lives at a fixed address and always shows your current tier. Copy the ready-made snippet from your dashboard — it looks like this:
<a href="https://markhambusiness.com/listing/your-business">
<img src="https://markhambusiness.com/badge/your-business.svg"
alt="Verified Markham Business 2026" width="200" height="56">
</a>Keep the link around the image. It is what lets a visitor check the badge instead of taking it on faith, and it is a real backlink to your listing.
Want the Verified badge?
Claim your listing, then start verification. We run the checks; if anything fails we tell you what to fix.