Frequently Asked Questions

Highstreett is a platform for finding and tracking the independent businesses on Britain’s high streets. It works two ways. You can talk to our AI agent, which learns your preferences over time and recommends places based on what you’ve liked before, a bit like Goodreads but for the local cafés, shops, restaurants, and venues you actually visit. Or you can use Highstreett as a straightforward directory: search “Thai restaurants in East London” and browse the results. The more you review the places you’ve been, the better your recommendations get.

Highstreett is an AI-led platform. When you ask the agent for a recommendation, it reads the context in your profile, searches the Highstreett database first, then searches the wider web within our guardrails. The underlying model we use will change over time. We’ll always pick whichever delivers the best recommendations for the context you’ve given it, not whichever is cheapest or biggest.

If you’d rather not use AI, you don’t have to. You can still use Highstreett as a directory to find and support local businesses.

Money spent at independent local businesses recirculates in the local economy at a significantly higher rate than money spent at chains. Most studies put the difference at roughly two to three times. Independents tend to bank locally, use local suppliers, and employ people who live nearby, so each pound goes further for the community around the business.

We built Highstreett to make the independent businesses on a high street easier to find, so they’re competing on a fairer footing with the chains around them.

• Is it actively trading and registered? We use Companies House for this.
• Who owns it? We check the ownership structure using Companies House and background checks. A business doesn’t qualify if it’s a national or multinational chain, a franchise, or owned by private equity.
• Is it locally owned? Independence is about ownership, not size. A local owner with a few different locations in a city still counts, because the money and the decisions stay local. That’s the point: keeping the local economic multiplier turning.

We check when a business is added, but ownership can change and we can miss things. If a business that was independent gets bought by a chain or private equity, we don’t delete it. We archive it with a “no longer independently owned” badge so its history stays visible, though its contact and booking buttons stop working. If we’ve got something wrong, flag it through the listing and we’ll review. Our full methodology is on the Independent Business Index methodology page.

We don’t pre-vet quality. That’s what reviews are for. Each visit to a restaurant or shop is going to be a bit different, and we think the aggregate of real reviews from people who’ve actually been there is the most honest signal of what to expect.

What we do watch for is review bombing and faked reviews. To leave a review on Highstreett, you have to go through the booking or directions flow first, which verifies you actually attended the business. If a review is flagged and confirmed false, we remove it. Repeated violations result in account suspension.

Not yet. We’re working on letting businesses take bookings directly through Highstreett, for restaurants, salons, and appointment-based businesses, but it’s not live. For now, Highstreett links you out to the business’s own booking page, website, or phone number.

Two ways:

• A small monthly membership fee for access to the AI agent and personalised recommendations. The directory itself is free to use.
• Sponsored listings for businesses that want extra visibility. A sponsored listing ranks higher in directory searches and may appear in relevant agent recommendations. Every sponsored listing is marked with a “Sponsored” badge in the same place every time, so you always know when you’re seeing one. The organic rankings, what shows up when nobody’s paying, are based on relevance, review quality, and user behaviour, not payment.

We don’t take a cut of bookings yet, though we may in future.

We don’t have a paid business membership. If you run an independent business and want to be listed, send us a request through the business signup page and we’ll add you to the directory. You can claim and update your listing free of charge.

Longer term, when we open up direct bookings and other revenue features, businesses will be able to opt into those, but the core directory listing will stay free.

Right now, Highstreett is available through our website at digitalhighstreett.com. Dedicated iOS and Android apps are coming over the next few months.

We’re starting with Lincoln and Bristol, then rolling out to Manchester, Nottingham, and Leeds next. Cities go live once we’ve seeded enough verified independent businesses to make the platform genuinely useful, typically 150 to 300 listings minimum.

If you’d like Highstreett in your city, you can register interest on the British Cities page and we’ll let you know when it’s available.