In short
- Sponsored listings come from businesses on our Pro tier (£95/month). A Pro subscription covers up to 10 listings, and every one of them is sponsored.
- They appear in the top slot on relevant search pages with a clearly visible "Sponsored" chip.
- Order between sponsored listings rotates daily across the directory and randomly on the homepage carousel, so every sponsored listing gets equal exposure over time.
- Trust Scores are calculated independently and are not affected by sponsorship.
- The full ranking code is open in the GitHub repo and the methodology is fixed.
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 per month) 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 city, service and region pages
When a page has more than one sponsored listing matching the location and service, their order rotates daily. The shuffle is seeded by today's date in UTC, which means:
- Every visitor sees the same order on the same day (so search engines see stable, indexable content).
- The order reshuffles every UK midnight, so over a month every sponsored listing spends roughly the same number of days in slot 1, slot 2, slot 3 and so on.
- 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 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 code is in the open. You can read the exact algorithm at lib/sponsored-rotation.js in our public GitHub repo. The current logic is:
- Split listings into sponsored vs organic.
- Shuffle the sponsored group using today's date (YYYYMMDD UTC) as the seed for a xorshift32 PRNG. Same date, same shuffle for everyone.
- Sort the organic group by Trust Score, highest first.
- 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 business with a claimed listing on The EV Pros. Upgrade from inside your dashboard under the "Upgrade" tab. Pro is £95/month with no long-term contract, and covers up to 10 listings on the one subscription.
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.
Want to feature your business at the top of relevant UK searches?
Upgrade to Pro →Policy last updated: 24 May 2026. Maintained by Mike McDonnell, Founder of The EV Pros.