How this is made, and what it is worth

The Local Register is written and published by tyso (tyso.io), a one-person growth studio in Canberra, Australia, run by Tyson Farrington. There is no editorial board, no panel of experts and no crowd. One person writes every entry and one person is accountable for every mistake in it.

That fact appears at the top of every page on this site, not just this one. A directory that hides its owner has something to hide.

tyso builds and markets websites for some of the businesses listed here. Those businesses pay tyso for that work. Every entry for such a business is marked as a client, on its profile page and anywhere it appears in a ranking. You never have to guess which ones they are.

Client status does not affect inclusion, and it does not affect position. A client is listed on the same terms as anyone else and is ranked on the same published criteria. Where a ranking would be dishonest without a business tyso has no relationship with, that business is included. A ranking that contained only clients would be a portfolio in a costume, and it is not published.

What being a client does change is depth. tyso already holds verified, confirmed information about the businesses it works for, so those profiles tend to carry more detail and a more recent verification date. That is a difference in what has been checked, not a difference in standing.

There is no paid listing, no featured placement, no sponsored slot, no priority tier, no advertising and no affiliate arrangement. No amount of money moves a business onto this site or up a list. If somebody offers, the answer is no, and the offer is not a factor in anything that follows.

Every outbound link on this site, including every link to a listed business, carries rel="nofollow", and links to listed businesses additionally carry sponsored. Those links pass no ranking credit to anyone. This is deliberate and permanent: this site is built to be read and cited, not to move search rankings around.

By being genuinely relevant to a list somebody would want to read. Listings are free, they are not applied for, and there is no queue to jump.

In practice an entry starts one of two ways.

Listed from public information. A business is researched and written up from sources it has already published: its own website, its own printed and social material, ABN Lookup and ASIC, and industry or certifying bodies it names. Those entries are marked Unclaimed because the business has not confirmed them. Nothing is scraped from a Google Maps page.

Confirmed with the business. The business is contacted and each fact is checked with it directly. The entry then carries the date of that confirmation.

Facts are recorded once, in a single registry, and every page is generated from it. Where a fact cannot be confirmed it is left out. An empty field is correct; a plausible guess is a defect.

Each ranking publishes its own criteria at the top of the page, in the order they are applied. Position follows those criteria and nothing else. Where two entries are close, the one with more checkable public information sits higher, because that is the thing this site can actually assess.

Rankings are a considered editorial opinion about publicly checkable facts. They are not a survey, not a test result, and not a measurement of workmanship. Nobody here has inspected the work. If you want that, ask the business for references.

This site does not collect reviews and does not score businesses. Where a Google rating is shown it is fetched live from Google when the page is served, capped at five reviews, shown with each author’s name and profile link, and linked back to the Google listing it came from. It is not stored here, not edited, and not chosen: Google decides which reviews it returns.

No rating on this site is ever placed in structured data. Republishing another platform’s ratings as machine-readable review markup is misleading, and it is not done here at any point.

Prices are never published. They change, they are quoted per job, and a number on this page would be wrong the day after it was written.

Every entry and every ranking carries the date it was last verified, visibly, on the page. Verification means checking that the business’s site is live, its phone number is published and unchanged, its stated service area still matches its own listing, and that no fact on the page has gone stale.

Entries are re-checked monthly. An entry that cannot be verified is corrected or removed rather than left standing with an old date on it.

Email tys@tyso.io. Say what is wrong, or say you want the entry gone.

Correction and removal requests are actioned within two business days, without argument and without asking why. There is no form, no verification hoop, no retention offer and no conversation about why. A business that does not want to be on this list is not on this list. Removal is permanent unless the business asks otherwise.

Corrections are made to the underlying record, so the fix propagates everywhere that fact appears rather than to the one page that was complained about.

It is not an accreditation, an endorsement, a licence check or a guarantee of any kind. It does not verify insurance, qualifications beyond what the issuing body publishes, or the quality of any completed job. Check licences yourself with the relevant state authority before you hire anyone.

It is also not comprehensive. It is small on purpose. A business missing from a list has not been judged and found wanting; most likely it has not been looked at yet.