Trust you can actually trust.
A review and trust system for African businesses, NGOs, schools, and clinics, engineered against fakes, self-praise, and brigading, and built to protect the people who leave reviews.
A TrustScore weighted for recency and verification, not a vanity average
Self-reviews blocked at the database; a fraud engine watches for brigading
Reviewers stay private: the raw reviews table is never publicly readable
Reputation, done honestly
Reviews only mean something if they are real. Every part of Ardent Reviews is built to keep them that way.
TrustScore, not a vanity number
A score from 0 to 100 weighted for recency and verification, shown with an honest 'still gathering data' band. It is never one opaque average that a handful of reviews can swing.
AI 'what people say'
A plain-language summary of the themes across every review, so anyone can grasp the reputation of a place at a glance: the good and the bad.
Claim & respond
Owners verify their listing by KYC, edit their public profile (logo, contact, socials), and reply to any review with a right of reply. Honest feedback stays, but you get a voice.
Verified invitations
Invite real customers to review in batches so your rating reflects everyone's experience, not just the loudest voices or the angriest day.
Anti-gaming by design
Self-reviews are blocked at the database. A fraud engine flags IP velocity, duplicate text, new-account bursts, and coordinated rating swings against admin-tunable rules.
Private & portable
The base reviews table is never anon-readable. A public API, an official WordPress plugin, an embeddable rating widget, and JSON-LD let a business show its verified trust anywhere on the web.
A profile, not a star rating with an address under it
A review is only as useful as what it is attached to. Most of this is the page a business owns once it claims it.
Claim it, then run it
Anybody can be listed; only the owner can claim one, and a claim is checked before it is granted. After that the page is yours: hours including the awkward ones, the services and products you actually offer, the attributes people filter on, photographs, and answers to the questions you are asked constantly.
Opening hours, including holidays and split shifts
Services and products with prices where you want them shown
Attributes people filter by, so you appear in the right searches
Answer, and be seen answering
Customers ask questions on the listing and you answer them with an owner badge, so a reader can tell your answer from a stranger's. You can reply to any review, good or bad, and your response rate is published separately from your score, because being responsive and being good are two different things.
Public questions and answers, with the owner marked
A reply on every review, in your own words
Response rate shown, and never folded into the score
Post updates, keep a timeline
A listing has a timeline of its own: new opening hours, a new branch, a temporary closure, a photograph of the new premises. It is the difference between a page that was correct once and a page somebody is looking after.
Updates that appear on the listing and reach followers
Photographs, from you and from customers
When something is wrong on somebody else's listing
Anybody can suggest an edit to a listing they do not own, and the suggestion is reviewed rather than applied. Nothing about a business changes because a stranger said so, and nothing stays wrong because the owner never noticed.
Suggestions are reviewed, never applied automatically
The owner is told what was suggested
How trust is built
01
Find or add an entity
Search businesses, NGOs, schools, and clinics, or add the one you want to review.
02
Write a star review
Rate overall and by dimension, and mark a verified experience where you genuinely have one.
03
Owners claim & reply
The business verifies ownership by KYC, edits its profile, and responds to feedback.
04
Trust compounds
The TrustScore updates continuously, weighted for recency and verification, with a confidence band.
We publish the formula, including the parts that are inconvenient
A score you cannot understand is not one you can trust, and a platform that hides its method is asking you to take its word for it.
How the number is built
A weighted average of published reviews on a scale of nought to one hundred. Two things change the weight: how recent a review is, so the score reflects the place as it is now rather than as it was three years ago, and whether it is tied to a real interaction that actually happened.
Reviews from the last ninety days count fully
Anything older than two years counts a quarter
A verified interaction counts more than an open review
The number is never shown alone
Four point eight from two hundred reviews and four point eight from four are not the same claim, so the count is always beside it and a listing with too few is labelled as still gathering rather than presented as settled.
Review count always shown
Thin listings say so rather than pretending
You cannot pick who reviews you
A business can invite customers to review it, and the invitation has to cover a genuine batch of real interactions rather than the six people who were happiest. Reviews are moderated before they count, and buying a better score is not a product we sell.
No hand-picking who gets invited
Moderation before a review counts toward anything
No paid placement, and no way to buy one
Including for us
Ardent Africa has a listing on Ardent Reviews and it is scored by the same formula as everybody else, with the same rules about what we may and may not do to it. A trust product that exempts its owner is not a trust product.
Same formula, same moderation, same rules
Reviewable without an Ardent account
Verified, PII-safe, and gaming-resistant, including for us.
Ardent Reviews is designed so that a rating is hard to fake and honest to read. It even holds Ardent itself to the same standard.
Self-reviews are blocked at the database level; a fraud engine watches IP velocity, duplicate text, and coordinated rating swings.
The raw reviews table is never anon-readable: every public read goes through a PII-safe projection.
Guests can leave a verified-receipt review after a real donation, signature, or ticket, identified by a salted hash, not an email.
Even Ardent reviews itself: two pinned self-entities held to maximum moderation, with every review human-approved.
Owners get a right of reply and can report policy-breaking reviews, but can never delete honest criticism.
The TrustScore shows a 'still gathering data' band when evidence is thin: it never fakes confidence it hasn't earned.
Everything in Reviews
What is built and switched on, grouped by what you would be trying to do.
Writing one
- Rate and write about any listed entity
- Photographs with your review
- Edit or delete your own review
- Review Ardent Africa without an account
- Reviews tied to a real interaction, marked as verified
Reading one
- A published TrustScore formula
- Review count shown beside every score
- Thin listings labelled as still gathering
- Response rate, separate from the score
- What people say, summarised from the reviews themselves
- Filter and sort by rating and recency
Your listing
- Claim a listing that is yours
- Opening hours, including holidays
- Services and products
- Attributes people filter on
- Photographs
- Frequently asked questions you write yourself
- Updates and a timeline
- Verification badges
Talking to customers
- Questions and answers, with an owner badge
- A reply on any review
- Invitations to review, covering a real batch
- Suggest an edit to a listing you do not own
Being found
- Near me search by radius
- A map with your exact location, Plus Code and Ghana Post GPS
- Category and attribute filters
- Structured data, so a search engine shows your rating properly
- Two-way marketplace reviews, buyer and provider
On your phone
- Write and edit reviews
- Manage hours, services, attributes and photographs
- Answer questions and reply to reviews
- Post updates
Questions, answered
No to all three. Self-reviews are hard-blocked at the database level, so a business literally cannot rate its own listing. Ratings are never for sale. And owners can reply to any review or report ones that break the rules for moderation, but they can never delete honest criticism. The whole point is that the record is not the owner's to edit.
A star average is trivially gamed: a burst of five-star reviews on a quiet listing swings it overnight. The TrustScore is a 0-to-100 measure weighted for recency and verification, shown with a confidence band so a thin record reads as 'still gathering data' rather than a fake, precise number. It rewards a steady history of verified experiences over any one-off spike.
Layered defence. A fraud engine scores IP velocity, duplicate text, new-account bursts, and coordinated entity-level rating swings against rules that admins can tune. AI pre-publish moderation checks content before anything goes live. And verified-experience reviews are weighted more heavily, so an organised pile-on of anonymous ratings moves the score far less than genuine, receipted feedback.
Signed-in users can review any entity. Guests can leave a verified-receipt review right after donating, signing a petition, or attending an event, identified by a privacy-safe salted hash rather than a stored email. Either way the raw reviews table is never publicly readable, so your identity is not exposed by leaving honest feedback.
Yes. Reviews are built to be portable: a public API, an embeddable rating widget, and JSON-LD structured data let you display your verified TrustScore and reviews on your own pages and in search results, without anyone being able to fake the number behind it.
Businesses, NGOs, schools, and healthcare facilities today. Government and religious entity types are fully modelled in the system but ship disabled for now, pending a legal and brigading-risk assessment, because those categories carry a higher risk of coordinated abuse.
Show the world you can be trusted.
Read verified reviews, claim your listing, and put a TrustScore you earned honestly on your own pages. Trust that is real, and provable.