Our Standards
How we find garages, what we verify before publishing, where reviews come from, and how we earn money. No marketing jargon — the actual mechanics.
Last updated: 30 August 2026
In one paragraph
We source UK garages from public business records, cross-check the data with AI enrichment, and only publish a profile when there's enough real signal to make it useful. Reviews are either pulled from public sources (with the source named) or written by drivers who booked through us. Garages set their own prices — Fixaroo doesn't mark anything up. We make money on booking commission, not subscriptions or pay-to-rank.
1. How garages get on Fixaroo
The directory starts with the Google Places API — the same public business-listings dataset that powers Google Maps. We pull garages, MOT centres, body shops, tyre fitters, detailers, and car washes across every UK postcode area, then store the basics: name, address, phone number, opening times, geolocation, and the business categories Google has on file.
Every garage we publish is in the UK. We filter by ISO country code at the database level — if a record's not tagged GB, it doesn't get a public profile. (We had US records leak in early on; we explicitly noindex'd them so Google drops them from results.)
From there, an AI enrichment pipeline (built on ScrapingBee + Claude) reads the garage's own website if they have one, and tries to fill in: services offered, opening hours by day, business about-text, and a representative image. Every enrichment write is logged in an audit table so we can trace where a given fact came from.
2. What 'listed' means — and what it doesn't
Plenty of garage directories say "verified" without saying what they verified. Here's what we mean:
- ✓ Real address, real postcode. Every listing has a UK postcode that resolves to a known location. No PO boxes, no residential addresses tagged as workshops.
- ✓ Categorised by what they actually do. "MOT centre" isn't applied because the business wrote "MOT" on their homepage — it's flagged when their service data lists an MOT product. Same logic for body shops, detailers, tyre fitters.
-
✓
Quality threshold before indexing. Garages without substantive content (no about text, no photos, no reviews, no claimed owner) are marked
noindex— they exist in the database but search engines won't surface them. We don't want to be the kind of directory Google has to wade through. - ! What we don't claim: we haven't physically inspected your local garage, and we don't pretend to. We're not the DVSA, and we don't issue MOT-tester certifications. If a garage is listed as an MOT centre on Fixaroo, that means they market MOTs — confirm with them directly that they're still DVSA-approved before you book a slot (MOT approvals can lapse).
3. Where reviews come from
Fixaroo shows two kinds of reviews and labels each one clearly:
Trustpilot reviews
When a garage has a public Trustpilot profile, we surface a sample of their reviews with attribution back to Trustpilot. We don't author or edit Trustpilot content — what you see is what Trustpilot publishes. We don't selectively show only positive reviews, and we keep the source link visible so you can read the full picture there.
Fixaroo native reviews
Reviews left by drivers who booked through Fixaroo. Each goes through a lightweight moderation step (it must clear basic abuse and spam filters before it's published) and is tied to a real booking — you can't review a garage you never visited.
We don't pay for reviews, we don't accept review-tier upgrades in exchange for placement, and we don't remove negative reviews on a garage's request. If a garage disputes a review, the disclosure process is public — we record the dispute and our decision on the listing.
4. How prices work
Garages publish their own prices. Fixaroo doesn't mark anything up, doesn't bid prices against each other, and doesn't insert a service fee at checkout. The price you see is the price the garage charges.
For services like MOTs where the UK government sets a maximum fee (currently £54.85 for class 4 vehicles), garages can choose to charge less but never legally more. Some Fixaroo listings offer MOTs well below the cap — that's their own decision, not a Fixaroo discount.
When a service is genuinely vehicle-dependent (e.g. clutch replacement on a 2018 Audi vs. a 2008 Ford), garages can mark a service as price on request rather than publish a misleading flat rate.
5. How Fixaroo earns money
Listings are free. Every UK garage in our directory can be listed without paying us a penny. There's no subscription tier required to appear in search results, no "premium" placement that bumps a garage above its rivals.
We earn money on commission — a percentage of the booking value, only when a real customer books and the garage delivers the work. If no work happens, nobody pays Fixaroo anything.
This matters because incentives shape behaviour. A subscription marketplace earns more by hosting more garages regardless of quality. A commission marketplace only earns when drivers actually book — which means we're directly punished if we surface garages that are hard to reach, slow to respond, or overcharge. We make money by making the experience good.
6. How we make articles, guides, and tools
Our articles and tools exist to help drivers make better decisions — when an MOT is due, what tax is owed, whether a recall applies to a registration, what a fair price for a service looks like.
AI assistance, stated plainly
Our articles are researched and drafted with AI assistance. We're not going to dress that up as something else — but we don't publish the output unread either. A draft is written against a specific question drivers actually search for, then it sits unpublished until a person at Fixaroo reads it. Only that person publishing it makes it live; nothing goes from the model straight to the web.
Once an article has been through that review, its byline says when it was last reviewed and who reviewed it. Older articles published before we put that gate in place carry a plain "Updated" date and no review claim — we'd rather show you the difference than blur it.
Where the facts come from
- ·DVSA — MOT rules, test standards, and MOT history via the DVSA's open MOT API.
- ·DVLA — vehicle tax status, recall status, and registered vehicle attributes via the DVLA's published endpoints.
- ·gov.uk — statutory fees and deadlines, including the government-set MOT fee cap.
- ·Our own directory — real UK garages, their categories, and the prices they publish. When an article talks about what garages charge or offer, that comes from listings, not from a model's guess.
Where a number is set by a government body, we cite it as such rather than paraphrasing it. Where something varies by vehicle or by garage, we say it varies instead of inventing an average.
Corrections
If you spot something wrong, tell us. Corrections get logged, the article gets a fresh review date, and if it was materially wrong we say what changed. We'd rather pull an article than leave a bad one up for the traffic.
The vehicle-lookup tools call the official UK data feeds directly: MOT history from the DVSA's open MOT API, vehicle tax and recall status from the DVLA's published endpoints. We don't store the personal data behind a registration — only the public vehicle attributes.
7. What we don't promise
Being clear about limits matters more than puffed-up claims:
- ·We don't guarantee a garage's pricing for parts — only the labour price they've published. Quality OEM parts cost more than aftermarket; ask before you book.
- ·We can't vouch for work after it's done. If a fault recurs, that's between you and the garage in the first instance.
- ·Opening times come from the garage — if a listing shows them as open Monday and they're actually closed, that's drift in the source data. Tell us and we'll re-sync.
- ·We don't replace official channels for serious complaints. The DVSA handles MOT disputes, Trading Standards handles consumer disputes; we'll point you the right way and remove a listing if there's a pattern of issues.
Tell us if something's wrong
A listing wrong? Pricing out of date? Review that shouldn't be there? We'd rather know than not. Visit our help centre or email [email protected]. We try to acknowledge within one working day.
For garages, see our partner page. For legal and data terms, see our privacy and terms.