Product Policy

What this document is

This page describes the principles and commitments that govern how Goler products work — how we make recommendations, what we will not do for money, and what users can expect from us regardless of who pays.

For the technical methodology behind our Quality and Risk scores, see Scoring Methodology. For information about how we handle personal data, see Privacy Policy. For how venues can challenge their scores, see Dispute Policy.

This is the document that describes the contract between Goler and the people who use it.

Our products

Goler operates several connected surfaces, all built on the same data and the same principles.

Listing. The main directory of venues, ranked and filterable by Quality, Risk, and other attributes. Available through our mobile application — no account required.

Trip Assistant. A natural-language interface where users describe what they want and receive ranked recommendations of venues. Currently in beta, available for Batumi.

Venue Hub. The administrative interface for venue owners — verification, profile management, dispute submission, and campaign publication.

The commitments below apply to all of these surfaces.

What our recommendations are based on

Every venue ranking, recommendation, and warning shown to users is based on two inputs and only two inputs:

• Our methodology — Quality and Risk scores derived from verified signals in user feedback, calculated according to the algorithm described on the Scoring Methodology page.
• The user's stated preferences — what the user asks for, filters by, or otherwise indicates as their criteria.

No other input determines whether a venue appears in a recommendation, where it appears in the ranking, or what is said about it.

What we will not do

These are commitments. They define what Goler is, by defining what Goler refuses to be.

We do not accept payment for placement in recommendations.

No venue can pay to appear in Trip Assistant recommendations, to be ranked higher in the listing, to be shown more prominently, or to have a competitor shown less prominently. Ranking and inclusion are determined exclusively by our methodology and the user's request.

This is true regardless of whether the venue is a paying customer for any other Goler product or service.

We do not hide negative signals for commercial reasons.

If a venue has a high Risk score, confirmed quality issues, or other warnings derived from our methodology, this information is shown to users. It is shown regardless of whether the venue is a Goler customer, has campaigns active, or has any other commercial relationship with us.

A venue cannot pay us to soften, hide, or remove its Risk score or warnings.

We do not insert advertising into recommendations.

When Trip Assistant recommends venues, those venues are not advertisements. They are not labeled as advertisements because they are not advertisements. The list reflects matching against the user's request, not commercial placement.

We do not allow paid information to influence the ranking algorithm.

The systems that compute recommendations do not have access to information about which venues are paying customers. This isolation is architectural — it is enforced by how our software is structured, not only by policy. A venue paying for a campaign cannot, by the design of our system, influence whether or how it appears in recommendations.

What venues can do

Venues can pay for campaigns — public announcements about events, offers, or activities they want to share with potential visitors. Examples: a grand opening, a discount during a specific time window, a free coffee with a croissant order, a tasting event.

A campaign is content authored and published by the venue. It is not a paid placement in our recommendations.

Campaigns are always shown as separate, clearly labeled messages — never embedded inside a recommendation. When Trip Assistant returns a recommendation, the recommendation itself contains only information derived from our methodology and the user's request. If a recommended venue has an active campaign, that campaign is delivered as a distinct follow-up message, visually and structurally separated from the recommendation, and explicitly marked PROMO CAMPAIGN.

For example: a user asks for the best place to eat khachapuri. Trip Assistant returns its recommendation based on Quality, Risk, and the user's criteria. If one of the recommended venues has an active campaign, the user then sees a separate PROMO CAMPAIGN message: "Heart of Batumi is offering 20% off khachapuri until 6pm today." The campaign does not modify, reorder, or influence the recommendation that came before it. It is additional information, presented separately, with its commercial nature disclosed.

This separation is not a stylistic choice. It is a structural commitment: a user reading a Trip Assistant recommendation can be certain that nothing in that recommendation was paid for.

How we help venues improve

Our mission is to help the hospitality industry get better, not only to measure it. To that end, we offer venues a set of tools to understand their own data and act on it.

When a venue declares that it has made changes — new staff training, updated protocols, resolved hygiene issues — our methodology temporarily reduces the weight of older signals to give the next cycle of user feedback room to reflect the new reality. If the new signals confirm the improvement, the score stabilizes at the new level. If they don't, the old signals return to full weight, or new issues take their place. The score follows what users actually experience, not what venues declare.

This mechanism — temporary reduction of older signals' weight when a venue declares changes — is available to every venue, free. Both paths also produce a public badge: Self-Reported Improvement (free) marks that the venue declared changes and we confirmed a reasonable basis; Improvement Program (paid) marks that the venue completed a structured program with a Goler-certified partner. Both are statements of fact about process, not endorsements of outcome. The score that follows is determined by what the next visitors report — not by which path was chosen.

What we do offer as a paid service is access to a Goler-certified partner — a consultant who reviews the venue's signals in the admin panel and helps the venue act on them. For example: if a venue shows a high harassment signal, the partner can structure staff training around the specific patterns the signals reveal. If a venue shows recurring allergen-handling issues, the partner helps build the protocols that address them.

The partner does not change how the score is calculated. The temporary reduction of signal weight, the surfacing of issues, the methodology itself — all of these work identically whether a venue uses the free version or the paid one. What the partner provides is interpretation and execution support — help understanding what the signals mean and what to do about them.

When a venue's score subsequently improves, it improves because the venue changed — staff was trained, protocols were fixed, conditions improved — and our methodology picks up the new signals. The score reflects the change in the venue, not the purchase of a service.

A venue cannot pay Goler to improve its score. A venue can pay Goler for help understanding what its score is telling it, and what to do about it. A venue can also pay for a more deeply verified record of the improvement process — the Improvement Program badge. This affects the public record of what was done, not how the score is computed. These are different products, and we are explicit about which one we sell.

How recommendations are accountable

Goler's recommendation logic operates on a public methodology. The Quality and Risk scores that drive ranking are documented on the Scoring Methodology page.

When Trip Assistant returns a list of venues, that list reflects the application of our methodology to the user's request. We do not maintain undisclosed signals that override the public methodology.

Concerns about specific recommendations can be sent to compliance@goler.co. Reports are reviewed and responded to.

Why we publish this

Goler is built for people — for the safety, time, and trust of the visitors who use it to decide where to go. Everything else follows from that.

We will never build a paid product that conflicts with this principle. Whatever paid features exist now, and whatever paid features we build in the future, will live within this boundary. A venue cannot pay us to influence what users see, how venues are ranked, or whether warnings are shown.

The hospitality industry has a long history of paid placement disguised as ranking, of suppressed criticism, of platforms whose loyalty quietly shifts from the people they serve to the businesses they review. We have seen what those systems become. This document exists to make clear, in writing, that Goler is not one of them — and to give users something to hold us to if it ever starts to look that way.