What 'verified' means at CercaClaro

In short: CercaClaro has four verification levels — Public listing, Claimed listing, Business verified and Credential verified — and every listing shows its level plus the date we last checked it. We verify tax identity, active trading status, and, where the profession requires it, professional registration or an official licence, against public Spanish registries such as the colegios profesionales (professional bodies), the Registro Integrado Industrial or the BORME. Verified isn’t a synonym for top quality — it’s a guarantee that the facts are real.

The four levels, from least to most checked

Every professional on CercaClaro sits at one of these four levels. Moving up costs nothing and doesn’t affect search ranking on its own — that’s governed by our methodology, which weighs relevance, proximity, data freshness and reviews, not verification alone.

Public listing. Facts pulled from open sources — municipal business-activity censuses, sector registers, or the company’s own website — with the source and capture date logged. The business hasn’t done anything yet: this is the starting point before anyone claims it.

Claimed listing. The business has confirmed by phone, email or WhatsApp that the listing is theirs, and can now edit their own details: hours, services, languages, coverage area. This doesn’t involve any extra check of tax identity or credentials — it’s the business saying “this is mine”, not CercaClaro certifying anything new.

Business verified. We check that the CIF (the company’s Spanish tax ID number) is valid and that the business is actively trading, cross-checking the aviso legal (the legal-notice page LSSI law requires on Spanish websites) on the provider’s own site against the BORME company register where it’s an incorporated company. The CIF itself is never published on the listing — only the “CIF verified” badge — because we treat it as sensitive beyond what’s necessary to show.

Credential verified. For regulated professions, we confirm professional registration or an official licence against whichever register applies. It’s the highest level because it depends on an official third party, not just us.

Which official registries we check

We don’t invent our own checks: we use the same public Spanish registers anyone could consult, one professional at a time, logging the result with its date.

• Immigration lawyers, gestores administrativos (admin agents), dentists, physiotherapists, psychologists, vets, architects: their colegiado (registration) number and active status, via the single electronic access point every colegio profesional (professional body) must provide under Ley 25/2009, which amended Spain’s Professional Associations Act to require it.
• Electricians and gas, plumbing or heating installers: registration as a licensed installer (empresa instaladora habilitada) in the Registro Integrado Industrial (RII), Spain’s Integrated Industrial Register, or the equivalent regional register.
• Renovation and construction firms: registration in the REA, the Registro de Empresas Acreditadas for the construction sector, run by the Ministry of Labour.
• Dental clinics and other healthcare centres: current authorisation in REGCESS, the Ministry of Health’s general register of healthcare centres, services and establishments.
• Sworn translators: a current appointment on the official list held by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MAEC) — the sole source for this category. We publish nothing about a sworn translator that MAEC doesn’t already make public.
• Company identity generally: the BORME, Spain’s official companies-register gazette, which records incorporations, directors and dissolutions.

Where a profession legally requires registration or a licence, we don’t publish the listing until that check is done — it’s a condition of appearing in the directory, not an optional extra.

How often we recheck the data

Facts go stale: a phone number stops working, a business closes, a registration lapses. So we recheck on an ongoing basis, not just once when a listing goes live:

• We re-crawl a professional’s website at least every 90 days, to catch changes to hours, services, or whether the site still exists.
• We reconfirm the phone number at least every 180 days.
• Any sign of closure — a dead website, a dissolution logged in the BORME, or the business telling us — triggers an immediate recheck, without waiting for the usual cycle.

Every listing shows a “Last verified” date. If we’ve gone more than 180 days without confirming a fact, we say so rather than hide it — we’d rather be honest about how old a piece of data is.

How your business can get verified

If you’re the professional, the process is the same whether you’re currently a Public listing or want to move up a level:

1. Find your listing via our services or the search page and use the “Is this your business?” link to claim it; we confirm it’s you by phone, email or WhatsApp.
2. Once claimed, you can ask to move to Business verified by providing your CIF, and to Credential verified by providing your colegiado number or registration number, so we can check it against the relevant official register.
3. If anything is wrong or has changed, fix it yourself from your claimed listing, or tell us via corrections; we review reports within 72 hours.

We don’t charge for verification, at any level. Paid plans for businesses buy extra visibility and tools — never a verification level that doesn’t match your actual documents.

What being verified doesn’t mean

Verified confirms specific facts are real and current. It isn’t a recommendation or a guarantee of service quality. Specifically:

• We don’t guarantee the work, the conduct or the outcome of any professional, whatever their level.
• It isn’t a ranked list of who’s superior to whom — we avoid that kind of claim across the whole site precisely because we can’t back it with data.
• Reviews are a separate system, governed by our own review policy: we only show a star rating once a listing has 5 verified reviews, and verification doesn’t stand in for that.
• A listing marked “Sponsored” doesn’t buy a verification level or a better position in results; our sponsored-content policy explains why.

Checking the facts is our job. Choosing is still yours: treat the verification level as one more data point, alongside language, area and reviews, before you ask for a quote.