Sponsored placement, explained

What "Sponsored" means here

A "Sponsored" listing on The EV Pros is a paid placement. The business is on our Pro tier subscription (currently £95 a month plus VAT) and gets:

• A top-of-list position on every relevant city + service page where they would already appear organically.
• A grey "Sponsored" chip on their card across the directory (UK ASA-compliant disclosure).
• Inclusion in the homepage Featured Specialists carousel rotation.
• Higher photo gallery limit and a more prominent contact CTA on their detail page.
• Up to 10 listings on the one subscription, for businesses running several branches or more than one trading name. Each listing is sponsored and each is disclosed in exactly the same way.

Because Pro covers up to 10 listings, a business with several branches can hold more than one sponsored slot in the same area. Every one of those listings carries the "Sponsored" chip, so what you are seeing is always labelled. Rotation below operates on listings, not on parent businesses.

Sponsored placement is always disclosed. We don't hide it or call it something softer like "Featured" to obscure the paid nature. That's per UK Advertising Standards Authority guidance on paid promotion.

How the order is decided

On search results and on city, service and region pages

When a page has more than one sponsored listing matching the location and service, their order is shuffled with a seed taken from the date in UTC, which means:

• Every visitor sees the same order on the same day (so search engines see stable, indexable content).
• On search results the order reshuffles daily at UTC midnight. The static city, service and region pages are generated in advance, so their order reshuffles on every site rebuild, seeded by the date of that build. Either way, nobody can buy a permanent top spot.
• Rotation is per listing. A business holding several sponsored listings on one Pro subscription therefore occupies several places in the rotation, each clearly chipped as Sponsored.
• Organic (non-sponsored) listings appear underneath, sorted by Trust Score. On search results you can change that sort yourself, and sponsored listings stay on top whichever sort you pick.

On the homepage Featured Specialists carousel

The homepage carousel picks up to two sponsored listings at random for each page load, then fills any remaining slot with a random organic listing. With multiple sponsored listings in the pool, every one of them gets equal expected airtime across enough page loads.

What sponsorship does NOT do

• It doesn't change the business's Trust Score (calculated nightly from real reviews, qualifications, claim status, etc).
• It doesn't suppress organic listings or remove them from results.
• It doesn't change HEVRA, IMI or Good Garage Scheme accreditation badges, which come from the actual trade bodies.
• It doesn't tip the editorial blog content. Sponsored businesses may be mentioned in blog posts if they're already a real example of the topic; we always disclose when this happens.

How to verify it yourself

The ranking and rotation rule is published here in full. The same logic runs in the static page generators and in the browser on the search results page, so what you read below is what every visitor gets. The current logic is:

1. Split listings into sponsored vs organic.
2. Shuffle the sponsored group using today's date (YYYYMMDD UTC) as the seed for a xorshift32 PRNG. Same date, same shuffle for everyone.
3. Sort the organic group by Trust Score, highest first (on search results, by whichever sort the visitor picked).
4. Output sponsored first, then organic, then take the top N for display.

If you spot what looks like a violation of this policy, please tell us via the contact page and we'll investigate within 48 hours.

Becoming a Sponsored Partner

Sponsored placement is available to any garage with a claimed listing on The EV Pros. Claiming is free and comes first: for the 30 days after a claim, every driver enquiry we match to that garage arrives in full, name, phone and email included, whether or not the garage ever pays. After those 30 days a free listing still receives each enquiry but the driver's contact details are held back. Pro (£95 a month plus VAT, no long-term contract) unlocks them on every enquiry, including any that landed while the listing was locked, and adds the sponsored placement described on this page. It covers up to 10 listings on the one subscription. Upgrade from inside your dashboard under the "Upgrade" tab, or from the Pro page.

One exception to sharing: an enquiry a driver sends from a garage's own profile page goes to that garage alone once the listing is claimed. It is never passed to competitors.

A small number of businesses may have a complimentary Sponsored Partner status (granted by The EV Pros team, usually because they were paying members before the Sponsored tier launched). These are clearly disclosed in the same way as paying Sponsored Partners and follow the same rotation logic.

Advertising partners

From September 2026 we accept advertising from businesses that are not garages: charger makers and installers, EV insurers, leasing companies, battery diagnostics firms, parts distributors, training providers, recovery operators and tool suppliers. The rules for them are stricter than for sponsored garages, because they are not competing for the same slot:

• Partners appear as clearly labelled "Partner" cards, in fixed positions such as a page sidebar, a homepage card, or a marked line in an email or report. They are never mixed into the list of garages and never presented as a listing.
• A partner card does not affect any garage's Trust Score, the order garages appear in, or which garages a driver enquiry is sent to.
• Sponsored guides written for a partner carry a disclosure at the top of the page, and the editorial content stays ours.
• We do not take advertising from garages through this route. A garage that wants placement uses Pro, so that every paid garage slot follows the same published rotation rule.

Placements and prices are on the advertising page.

Policy last updated: 8 September 2026. Maintained by Mike McDonnell, Founder of The EV Pros.