Widget & Embedding Terms

_Last updated: 3 August 2026_

These Widget & Embedding Terms govern the use of TrustRating's embeddable widgets and badges — the components that display a company's live TrustScore, star rating, review count and recent reviews on the company's own website — as well as the marketing assets provided in the business panel. They form part of the Business Terms of Service. The widgets exist for exactly one purpose: to let a business show the truth about its reputation, live, on its own pages. Every rule below protects that purpose, because a widget consumers cannot trust is worthless to everyone — including you.

1. The licence

Subject to these terms and an eligible active plan (see the Subscription, Billing & Cancellation Terms), TrustRating grants the subscribing company a limited, non-exclusive, non-transferable, revocable licence to embed the official widgets on websites and apps owned or operated by that company — the company whose claimed profile the widget displays. "Owned or operated" reads naturally: your main site, your country-specific sites, your web shop, your app, your official social landing pages. It does not cover a distributor's site (they can embed their own profile's widget), a marketplace listing you do not control, or a client's site if you are an agency — the licence follows the company being scored, not whoever holds the login. The licence covers the embed mechanisms we provide (script or iframe snippets and configuration options from the business panel) and nothing else. It does not permit: embedding another company's widget or score; sublicensing widgets to clients (each company needs its own claim and plan); or use in contexts that violate the Acceptable Use Policy.

2. What the widgets are

The catalogue evolves, but the families are stable, and your plan determines which are available (see the Subscription Terms). Score badges — compact components showing the live TrustScore and star rating, for headers, footers and product pages. Review carousels and lists — components displaying recent reviews from your profile, with reviewer display names and ratings as they appear on TrustRating. Combined trust modules — larger components pairing the score with review highlights and a link to the full profile. Every widget, whatever its size, shares three invariants: the data is live from your profile, the component links back to the profile so a visitor can verify everything in one click, and the presentation identifies TrustRating as the source — those three properties are what make an embedded number credible rather than decorative, and they are exactly the properties Section 3 forbids removing.

Widgets are also built to be good guests on your pages: they load asynchronously so they cannot block your content, they are responsive to their container, they meet accessibility standards in isolation (semantic markup, contrast, text alternatives — see our Accessibility Statement), and they degrade silently if our infrastructure is unreachable rather than breaking your layout.

3. Live data, unmodified — the integrity rules

A widget's value is that it cannot lie. Accordingly, you must not: alter, obscure or overlay the score, star display, review count or any content the widget renders; intercept, cache, screenshot or re-implement the widget so that it shows stale or selected data — the widget must always be the live component served by us, showing whatever the score and reviews actually are right now; recreate the widget's appearance ("fake widgets") in your own markup, with or without real numbers; display the widget in a context that misattributes the score (for example next to a different brand, product or subsidiary than the profile it belongs to); or hide the widget conditionally based on what the score currently is — taking the widget down entirely is always your right, showing it only on good days is deception. Cropping in marketing materials is governed by Section 6.

If your subscription lapses or your plan no longer includes widgets, the components stop serving (see Section 6) — attempting to circumvent that, like any circumvention of entitlements, violates the Acceptable Use Policy. These integrity rules protect the honest majority most of all: every faked widget discovered anywhere erodes what a real one is worth everywhere, which is why enforcement here is a service to every subscriber displaying true numbers.

4. Technical use

Embed the snippet as provided; you may configure only through the options the business panel exposes (style variants, layouts, themes offered for your plan). The configuration surface is the contract: everything the panel offers is safe to use, everything it does not offer is not missing but excluded — the difference between a theme option and a tampering opportunity is exactly the difference between the two lists. Do not wrap the widget in code that intercepts its network traffic, strips its attribution, or injects content into it. Widgets are served from our infrastructure and may be updated, restyled or improved by us at any time without notice — pinning old versions is not supported, because a frozen widget eventually becomes a wrong widget, and the entire design exists to make wrong displays impossible. You are responsible for the pages that embed the widget: their legality, their performance budget, and their compliance with your own privacy obligations. On our side, widgets are built lean and privacy-respecting: they display trust data without setting advertising cookies or profiling your visitors, as described in the Cookie Policy; aggregate impression counts may be recorded server-side and shown to you in your analytics.

5. Availability

We operate widgets with the same care as the platform, but they are provided without an uptime guarantee unless your plan or a separate agreement states one. Scheduled maintenance and rare outages may interrupt serving; the widget is designed to fail quietly (rendering nothing rather than breaking your page). We are not liable for the consequences of widget unavailability on your site beyond the caps in the Business Terms of Service. One consequence of the fail-quiet design deserves emphasis: an outage never justifies replacing the live widget with a static copy "temporarily" — the temporary copy outlives every outage, which is how stale numbers are born. If availability materially matters to your use, raise it with sales; a committed service level belongs in a written agreement, not in hope.

6. Termination of the licence

The licence ends automatically when: your subscription ends or is suspended (including for non-payment after the grace process in the Subscription Terms); your plan changes to one that does not include the widget in question; your claim to the company profile is released or revoked under the Claims & Domain Verification Policy; or we revoke it for breach of these terms. Automatic termination is mechanical, not punitive — the same entitlement system that turns features on turns them off, and resubscribing turns the widgets back on with your previous configuration where technically feasible. On termination, the components stop serving from our side, and you must remove the embed code from your pages within a reasonable time — leaving dead embeds is untidy, and re-implementing the display yourself after termination violates the integrity rules of Section 3 exactly as it would during the subscription. Ending widget use never affects your profile, reviews or score.

7. Marketing assets and score displays outside widgets

Plan-dependent marketing assets (badges, banners, score visuals for email signatures, packaging or print) may be used only: while the plan that includes them is active; in unmodified form except sizing; with the score or rating as of a stated date where the asset is static ("TrustScore 4.6 — January 2026"), because print cannot be live; and never in a way that misrepresents the current situation — if your score has moved materially since a printed asset was produced, phase it out with reasonable diligence. The dated-snapshot rule is the honest compromise between two truths: printed materials cannot update, and consumers must never be shown a number as current when it is not. The as-of date resolves both — a brochure with "4.6 in January" remains truthful forever, while a brochure with a bare "4.6" becomes a lie the day the score moves. Digital contexts have no such excuse: anywhere a live widget can technically exist, the live widget is the required form of score display. Any use of the TrustRating name and logo beyond the assets we provide follows the brand rules in the Content Integrity, Scoring & IP Policy. Press quoting scores with attribution and date needs no licence — facts are free; our design and marks are not, and the distinction holds in both directions, for everyone, on every surface.

8. What widgets never do

For absolute clarity, widgets and their configuration options will never allow: hiding negative reviews from the recent-reviews display while showing positive ones; rounding a score upward beyond the display precision used platform-wide; or showing a number different from the profile's live score. If you ever find a configuration that appears to permit deception of this kind, it is a bug — report it via the contact page and do not use it. This mirrors our own commitment: the widget your visitors see equals the profile they can check, always.

9. Allowed and forbidden, by example

Because most widget questions are variants of the same few, here is the pattern book. Allowed: embedding your score badge in your site footer sitewide; a review carousel on your homepage showing whatever your latest reviews are, including critical ones; the combined module on a landing page, linking back to your profile; a static banner in an email signature stating your score with its as-of date, using the assets from your panel; showing the widget on your checkout page — confidence where it counts is the point. Forbidden: a CSS rule that hides the widget whenever the score dips below a threshold (conditional display, Section 3); a screenshot of last spring's 4.8 used as if live after the score moved to 4.1 (stale display); a carousel filtered — by any means — to show only five-star reviews (selection); rebuilding the badge in your own HTML "because the embed was slow" (fake widget, even with the correct current number, because it stops updating the moment you stop maintaining it); embedding the score of your better-rated sister company on your own brand's site (misattribution); and a "TrustRating Certified Partner" seal your designer invented (fabricated endorsement — see the brand rules in the Content Integrity, Scoring & IP Policy). When a case is genuinely new, ask before shipping it: contact us, describe the intended display, and you will get a written answer you can rely on.

10. Indemnity and responsibility

You are responsible for where and how you embed. If a third party claims against us because of the pages you embedded widgets into, your misuse of the components, or marketing assets you altered, the indemnity in the Business Terms of Service applies. Conversely, the widgets and assets as we provide them do not, to our knowledge, infringe third-party rights, and we address any such claim against the unmodified components ourselves.

11. Enforcement

Widget misuse is score manipulation in costume, and is treated with the same seriousness as fake reviews: measures range from configuration correction requests, through licence revocation and plan termination for cause, to public integrity notices where consumers were actively deceived by a faked or frozen display, applying the framework of the Moderation & Appeals Policy including its appeal rights. Honest mistakes — a stale printed banner, a misconfigured embed — are fixed cooperatively; we distinguish sloppiness from fraud, and the first contact for a suspected honest mistake is a correction request with a deadline, not a sanction. What converts sloppiness into fraud is the response: fixing a stale display when told is the end of the matter; defending it, hiding it, or re-deploying it is the beginning of one.

12. Changes

We may update these terms as the widget catalogue evolves, following the change process of the Terms of Service. The date above identifies the current version; material changes are announced in advance through the business panel or by email.