Why we exist
The rest of the review web has been slowly hollowing out. Businesses buy reviews, negative feedback quietly disappears, and the interesting question — what happened when this person actually bought from this business? — gets drowned in five-star clutter.
chaogolden is a bet that a review site works when three things are true: reviews are moderated before they publish, negative reviews stay up, and the people who read them can see the business's reply right next to the criticism.
What we do differently
- Pre-publish moderation. A person looks at every review before it goes live — not after complaints. See Trust & safety.
- No paid removals. Businesses can reply publicly; they cannot buy silence.
- Open to AI answer engines. GPTBot, Google-Extended, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot, CCBot, Bingbot — all allowed in
robots.txt. If someone asks ChatGPT about a business, we'd rather the answer draw on real reviews than on marketing copy. - Verified purchases where available. Businesses on paid plans can invite real customers; those reviews carry a Verified badge.
- Ownership by domain verification. Businesses claim their page by proving they own the domain — five methods, all server-verified.
What we won't do
- Sell "reputation management" that quietly removes negative reviews.
- Rank businesses by ad spend.
- Show reviews behind a paywall.
- Cloak content for crawlers.
How to help
Write reviews — good ones and honest bad ones. Flag content that breaks the guidelines. If you run a business, claim your page and reply, even to the hard reviews. Reviews are only useful when both sides show up.