Honest reviews, written with care.
Families make some of the hardest decisions of their lives from what they read here. These guidelines keep every review honest, relevant, and safe for the residents behind it. Write in good faith and you have nothing to worry about.
Anyone with a genuine, first-hand experience
Reviews come from the three groups who actually see how a community runs. Every one is tied to a verified person before it publishes.
Write about care you or a family member received first-hand. If you managed a parent's move or visited them regularly, that counts — write about what you actually witnessed, not what you were told second-hand.
Caregivers, nurses, aides, and other employees can review a community they worked at. Focus on staffing, training, management, and resident safety as you experienced them — not on a single co-worker dispute.
Hospice and home-health clinicians, care managers, social workers, and advocates can review communities where they worked with residents. Write from your professional observations of care and coordination.
Seven rules that keep reviews worth trusting
Be honest — write from real experience
A review must describe a genuine, first-hand experience with a specific community.
- Write about care you, your family member, or the residents you served actually received.
- Describe what happened as accurately as you can remember it.
- Don't invent an experience, exaggerate, or repeat rumors you can't stand behind.
- Don't write, buy, or solicit fake reviews — for a community or against a competitor. Fabrication is the one thing that gets a review removed and an account blocked.
- Don't post someone else's story as if it were your own.
Keep it relevant and reasonably recent
Reviews help families choosing care today, so they should reflect the community as it is now.
- Focus on the things families weigh: care quality, staffing levels, safety, cleanliness, food, activities, communication, management, and value.
- Note roughly when your experience happened — a community can change a lot after new ownership or a management change.
- Don't review an experience so old it no longer reflects the community. Ownership, staff, and standards move on.
- Don't rate the wrong community. Check the name, city, and address before you post.
Protect residents' privacy and dignity
Senior care is intimate. What you saw about one resident is not yours to publish about another.
- Write freely about your own care or your own family member's experience.
- Describe staff conduct and community conditions in general terms.
- Don't share another resident's name, room number, photo, diagnosis, or health details. Their medical information is private.
- Don't name individual employees in a way that targets or endangers them, or post anyone's contact information, family details, or images without consent.
Keep it lawful and respectful
Strong criticism is welcome. Abuse, hate, and unlawful content are not.
- Be direct and specific, even when the review is negative — that is exactly what families need to read.
- Don't post threats, harassment, or content that attacks people over race, religion, disability, age, gender, or sexuality.
- Don't post sexually explicit, violent, or illegal content.
- Don't make accusations you can't reasonably stand behind as your honest account — defamatory claims can be removed.
Declare conflicts — no reviewing your own business
Reviews are worthless if the people selling the care are writing them.
- If you have any financial or family tie to a community, disclose it plainly in your review.
- Don't review a community you own, operate, invest in, or market for — and don't review a competitor to damage it.
- Don't have staff, agencies, or families post reviews on the community's behalf.
- Don't let a placement agent or referral service write or shape your review.
No paid or incentivized reviews
Nobody should be able to buy a rating — that's the whole reason this site exists.
- Write the review you'd give whether or not anyone was watching.
- Don't accept money, discounts, gifts, or a break on the bill in exchange for a review or a particular rating.
- Don't let a community offer to write, edit, or approve your review before you post it.
The one exception is our own launch offer, which pays $250 for a first verified review — positive or negative — and is clearly labeled as incentivized on the site.
No advertising, spam, or self-promotion
A review is about care, not a place to sell something.
- Keep the review about the community and the experience.
- Don't include ads, referral links, promo codes, or pitches for another business or service.
- Don't post the same review repeatedly or flood a community with duplicate ratings.
If someone is in danger, a review is not enough
Please still write about what you saw — it warns other families. But a review does not reach anyone who can act tonight. If you suspect abuse, neglect, or an immediate safety risk:
- Call 911 if someone is in immediate danger.
- Report suspected abuse or neglect to Adult Protective Services and your state's Long-Term Care Ombudsman.
- Contact the state licensing or health agency that inspects the community.
What makes a review families can actually use
Be specific
“Call lights answered within minutes” or “waited 40 minutes for help to the bathroom” tells a family far more than “good” or “bad.”
Cover what matters
Staffing, safety, medication handling, food, cleanliness, activities, and how the community communicates with families are the things people read most closely.
Be fair
Note what was done well alongside what wasn't. A balanced review is more useful — and more believable — than an all-caps rave or takedown.
Give a timeframe
Say roughly when this happened and how long the stay lasted. Care under one administration can look nothing like the next.
We may ask you to prove your experience
Because every published review is tied to a verified person, we may ask for proof of your connection to a community — move-in paperwork, a billing record, a pay stub, or a professional license. It is stored privately and never shown on your review. See how verification works.
See something that breaks these rules?
Anyone can flag a review — a family member, a reader, or the community itself. Flagged reviews go to a human moderator who checks them against these guidelines. A community can also respond publicly to any review, but no community can pay us to bury or delete one. We take zero commissions, so nothing bends the record.
What happens next
Minor issues — an off-topic line, a stray phone number — we may edit or ask you to fix. Reviews that are fake, defamatory, or expose someone's private information are removed. Serious or repeat abuse, including fabricated reviews and conflict-of-interest posting, can get an account blocked or deleted. Deleting an account removes its reviews with it.