Most trust badges on UK business websites prove nothing. Someone paid a fee, filled in a form, or joined a directory, and a logo appeared. Customers worked that out years ago, which is why a row of badges in a footer now reads as decoration rather than proof.
The mistake is treating a badge as a design element. A badge is a claim. A claim is only worth something if somebody else issued it and anybody can check it.
So this one works differently. You cannot buy it. You cannot apply for it. Saving the image and uploading it to your own site does not work either, because the badge is served from here and reports your live score. It is issued by the free Whito Visibility Check, at a score of 70 or above, and nothing else.
Claim your badge
Enter your website. The check runs in about twenty seconds and you see the result on this page. If you clear 70, the embed code appears underneath. If you do not, you get the list of what is costing you points.
Enter your website. We run the seventeen checks behind the free Whito Visibility Check. Score 70 or more and the embed code appears on this page. Free, and we do not ask for your email.
What the badge says, and what it does not
It says one specific thing. The structural work that decides whether AI tools and search engines can read your business, verify it is real, and repeat it back to someone asking for a recommendation has been done to a measurable standard.
It does not say you are the best plumber in Leeds. It does not say your customers are happy. It is not a review score and it is not an award. Whito does not know how good you are at your job, so the badge does not pretend to.
A badge that claims everything means nothing.
The seventeen checks behind it
The score is out of 100 and splits across the three stages Whito works in.
- Start, 35 points. Identity and trust. HTTPS, a verifiable Companies House record, a phone number, a postcode, a title tag that says who you are.
- Build, 45 points. Structure. Organisation schema, sameAs links, a sitemap, a meta description, one clear H1, FAQ markup, an llms.txt file, and a robots.txt that does not quietly block the AI crawlers you want reading you.
- Scale, 20 points. Visibility signals. Content depth, Open Graph tags, and whether anything on the site has changed recently.
Every check is deterministic. Same site, same inputs, same score. There is no panel of judges, no submission, and no editorial discretion. You can read every check, with its point value, on the Whito Visibility Check page.
Why the line is at 70
Below 70 a site is usually missing something structural rather than something clever. A missing company number, no organisation schema, a robots.txt blocking GPTBot by accident. Those are foundations, and Whito does not hand out proof of foundations that are not there.
Seventy is reachable in an afternoon by most business websites. The line sits where the foundations are, not at a level chosen to keep the number of holders down.
There is a second line at 65. The badge is earned at 70 and withdrawn below 65. That gap exists because one of the seventeen checks is time sensitive and worth six points on its own, so a site sitting at 71 could otherwise lose its badge in a week without changing anything. Harder to earn than to keep, inside a small margin.
The badge follows your score
The image is generated here, on request, from your current score. It is not a picture you downloaded in 2026 and forgot about.
We re-run the checks on every badge holder about once a month. If your score goes up, the badge shows the new number. If your site drops below 70, the badge says so, and so does your verification page. Nobody has to police it, because there is nothing to police.
The badge is worth having for the same reason an MOT certificate is worth having. It has a date on it.
Where to put it
Two sizes are offered, a standard badge and a compact one. Pick whichever fits.
The footer, the about page, or a trust strip near your contact form. One placement is enough. The badge links to your verification page on whito.co.uk, which shows your current score and explains what was measured, so a customer or a supplier can check it in one click.
Do not put it on a page it does not describe. The badge covers your website as a whole, not an individual service page.
Businesses holding the badge
Every name below passed the check. None of them paid, and none of them submitted anything.
2 websites hold the badge. 0 have it displayed and linking back, confirmed by us fetching the page.
Every score here was issued by the check, not submitted. Scores are re-run about once a month. A tick means we fetched their homepage and found the badge. Each name links to its verification page.
Common questions
Is it really free?
Yes. There is no fee, no membership, and no email required to run the check or to get the code.
What happens if my score drops?
Nothing, until it falls below 65. The badge is earned at 70 and withdrawn below 65. Below that line it says the site is not currently verified and your verification page explains why. Fix the checks, run it again, and it comes back. Nothing is deleted and nothing expires.
Can I use my own image instead?
You can put any image you like on your own website, but it will not be the badge. The badge is the file served from whito.co.uk. A saved copy stops telling the truth the moment your score changes, which is exactly the problem this is meant to solve.
Does the badge slow my site down?
No. It is a single SVG of under a kilobyte, cached for twelve hours.
Do I have to be listed on Whito?
No. The badge and the Whito listing badge are separate things. The listing badge says you are on the Whito directory. This one says your website passed the visibility check. You can hold either, both, or neither.
Does the link help my SEO?
The badge links from your site to your verification page here, not the other way round, so treat any search benefit as incidental. The reason to display it is that a customer, a procurement team or an AI tool can verify the claim.
Can I get the badge for a client site?
Yes. Run the check on their domain. The badge belongs to the domain, not to whoever ran the check.
The takeaway
A badge nobody can verify is a sticker. A badge that reports a live score, issued by someone with no interest in flattering you, is evidence. If your site clears 70, take the code. If it does not, the gap list tells you what to fix first, and that is worth more than the badge.