How We Check Facts and Golfer Feedback

Two kinds of information appear on a GolfSay page, and they are gathered, checked and labelled differently: facts the venue publishes, and opinions golfers share.

Facts: how we check them

Source. Fees, visitor times, handicap rules, facilities and contact details come from the venue's own website, rate card, or booking page. Resellers' discounted tee times are never treated as the club's rate.
Saved copy and exact words. Each fact is stored with the exact words it came from and a saved copy of the page. Software checks that those words are on the saved page and that every number matches. A fact that fails is not published.
Dated. Every price row shows the day we read it and links to its source. Fees are re-checked monthly from March to October and quarterly in winter, since most clubs change prices on 1 April.
Independent audit. Each month a separate reviewer re-checks a random sample of facts against the live pages. The last sample, October 2026, found no wrong or changed facts in the 76 that could be checked.
Not stated is not no. If a club does not say, we show "not stated", never a cross.
Derived values. Some figures are our arithmetic on published prices: the cheapest adult 18-hole price, the price per hole, pence per range ball. They are labelled "derived" and the price row they come from is named.

What we list

Golf venues in Brighton & Hove, plus a labelled "nearby" ring of courses and ranges within about 35 minutes' drive of central Brighton. Drive times are estimates, not routed journeys. A venue is listed only when we can show it is trading; closed venues go in the changed and closed log, not the listings.

Golfer feedback: how it is gathered and summarised

Where we look. Public review sites such as Golfshake, Tripadvisor, GolfPass and Hole19, golf forums, local news and blogs. Some sites refuse automated readers or a plain browser; we do not work around that, and we say on the venue page what we could not cover. Google reviews are not used until we can use Google's official interface, and we do not collect them from Maps pages.
Short quotes only. We quote at most 40 words, exactly, with the reviewer's name as shown, the site, the date and a link to the original. We never copy whole reviews.
Proved. Software checks that each quote appears on the saved copy of the page it came from.
Themes need two voices. A theme such as "greens" or "value" appears only when at least two different people or sites say something about it. One voice is shown as a quote, not a theme. Disagreement is a theme too.
Our words, their facts. The summary under each theme is ours and may only use what is in the quotes: no extra numbers, kit names or places. Opinions never change the fees or rules, which come from the venue.
Dated. Anything older than five years is labelled with its year, because courses change.
Ratings are shown as text. "4.4 out of 5 from 101 Golfshake reviews, checked Oct 2026" is a fact about another site, linked to it. It is not our rating and is not marked up as one. A rating that describes a different business at the same address, such as a cafe, is not shown as the golf rating.
Fairness. We do not quote allegations about named individuals from a single unverifiable voice. A venue cannot remove a fair review, and a reviewer cannot change what the club's own page says.

Corrections

If a fee, rule or fact is wrong, or a quote is misattributed, email hello@golfsay.com with the page and what you saw. We check against the venue's own page and fix confirmed errors, usually within two working days, and the date on the row changes. Venues can claim their listing. To ask us to remove a quote, write to the same address and name the page and the quote.

Reviewed by Alex Christou, the editor. About GolfSay.