Review verification standards
Last updated June 2025
The standard: no anonymous reviews
Business broker reviews are easy to game — they are hard to get, easy to fake, and impossible to interpret without context. A five-star rating from an anonymous poster with no transaction details tells a seller nothing useful. We decided early that anonymous reviews would do more harm than good, so we require proof of a real engagement before publishing any review.
This means our review corpus is small right now. That is intentional. A broker with zero verified reviews is not a bad broker — it means no BizBrokerMatch seller has completed a transaction with them yet. Do not read absence of reviews as a negative signal.
What proof we require
To submit a review, you must provide one of the following:
Transaction document
A redacted closing statement, asset purchase agreement cover page, or sold listing confirmation showing the broker's name and approximate closing date. We redact or blur all financial figures before storing.
Dual confirmation
Both the reviewer and the broker independently confirm the engagement took place. We send a verification request to the broker's email on file. If the broker declines to confirm or doesn't respond within 14 days, we use transaction document verification instead.
Platform introduction
If the introduction was made through BizBrokerMatch, the transaction record is already in our system. No additional documentation required.
What we redact
Before publishing a review, we redact or blur:
- —The sale price or transaction value
- —The business name, if the reviewer requests it
- —Any detail that could identify a specific transaction to a third party (industry + city + sale year combinations that narrow to one known business)
- —Contact information of any party
We keep the reviewer's identity private by default. The broker can see that a review came from a verified transaction but cannot see the reviewer's name unless the reviewer chooses to disclose it.
Broker response rights
When a verified review is published, the broker is notified and has 30 days to post a response. Broker responses are limited to 500 words and are published as-written alongside the original review. We do not arbitrate disputes over factual claims — both the review and the response appear so readers can judge for themselves.
Disputes and removal
If a broker believes a review is fraudulent, defamatory, or based on a transaction that did not occur, they can submit a dispute request with supporting documentation to ryan@bizbrokermatch.com. We will review the dispute within 10 business days and notify both parties of the outcome.
We remove reviews that fail re-verification or that are found to violate our standards. We do not remove reviews simply because a broker objects to the content.
Have you worked with a broker listed on BizBrokerMatch? Find their profile to submit a review →