On September 20th, 2026 we were informed that the Platinum transparency badge on Judge.me means 99% of verified reviews had been displayed, rather than 100% as the Testimonials page stated.
This was a total surprise, because we are VERY proud of the fact that no reviews have ever been deleted or hidden, so we began doing some research.
Every now and again Clients would write us because they made duplicate reviews and ask if one could be removed. Since we did not want to DELETE anything (because of the Transparency badge), we would hit the ARCHIVE button. This did stop them from displaying on the front-end, so it makes total sense that Judge.me would consider it a lack of transparency, but in reality — we didn't understand how the system worked, and because we were operating in good faith, just didn't think deeply enough about it.
We do our utmost to keep a large, busy website tidy and ALSO didn't want duplicate reviews artificially throwing off rate counts, so it seemed in the best overall interest to remove them from the mix.
For these reasons, we were mistaken that Platinum MEANT 100% instead of a mere 99% on technicality 😅
If we had understood, we would have NEVER Archived any duplicate review and just left them hanging.
If we still had ACCESS to Judge.me's dashboard, we could simply UNARCHIVE any duplicate reviews to restore our Diamond badge, but alas — we no longer have access to its platform (Judge.me moved to serving Shopify exclusively in the Fall of 2025, which was upsetting to us because of our immaculate, hard-earned record!).
After anguishing over what to do about this, we decided to shift the medal to Diamond so the language would 1. be correct and 2. reflect our actual behavior.
For historical accuracy, here is a screenshot of the Platinum Transparency badge before the edit:
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