Legal Terms
Terms of Use, Liability Limitation and Privacy Policy — one page.
Last updated 23 July 2026.
Terms of Use
1.Accepting these terms
PizzaGrades ("we", "us") publishes pizzeria rankings at
pizzagrades.com. By using the site you agree to these Terms of Use, the
Liability Limitation, and the Privacy
Policy. If you do not agree, stop using the site.
We may update these terms. Material changes are reflected in the "last updated"
date above; continued use after a change means you accept the revised terms.
2.What the site is
PizzaGrades computes a 0–10 grade for pizzerias by blending public review data
with reviews submitted here, under the rules described in the
scoring methodology. The grade is
an opinion and an editorial estimate — not a certification, an
inspection result, a health rating, or a statement of fact about any business.
3.Acceptable use
You may browse, search, and share PizzaGrades pages freely. You may not:
- Scrape, bulk-download, or systematically copy the rankings, grades, or
underlying data for a competing product or dataset
- Reverse-engineer, probe, or overload the site, its APIs, or its Workers,
including automated request floods
- Submit reviews you were paid, comped, or asked to write, or reviews for a
business you own, work for, or are related to
- Post unlawful, defamatory, harassing, hateful, or deliberately false content
- Impersonate another person or business, or use bot or purchased accounts
- Remove or obscure attribution, copyright, or source notices
4.Reviews and other content you submit
You keep ownership of anything you post. By submitting a review, photo, comment,
or correction, you grant us a worldwide, royalty-free, perpetual, non-exclusive
licence to store, display, reproduce, adapt, and distribute it on PizzaGrades and in
aggregate scores derived from it.
You confirm the content is your own genuine experience, is accurate to the best
of your knowledge, and does not infringe anyone's rights.
Review integrity. Submissions run through fraud screening
before they can affect any grade. Reviews judged fabricated, incentivized,
insider, coordinated, or off-topic are excluded — see
methodology §7. We follow the FTC rule on consumer
reviews and testimonials (16 CFR Part 465). We may remove any submission, and
suspend access, at our discretion and without notice.
5.Third-party data and links
Grades incorporate data from third-party platforms — including Google Places,
Yelp, TripAdvisor, and delivery services — each governed by its own terms. Those
platforms do not endorse, sponsor, or verify PizzaGrades. Marks and trade names
belong to their owners.
Outbound links to ordering, booking, and map services are provided for
convenience. We do not control those sites and are not responsible for their
content, prices, availability, or handling of your data. Some outbound links are
affiliate links and may earn us a commission at no extra cost to you; commissions
never influence a grade.
6.Our intellectual property
The PizzaGrades name, logo, site design, written methodology, and the compiled
grades and rankings are ours and are protected by copyright and trade-mark law.
You may quote a grade with attribution and a link. You may not republish the
rankings wholesale or present them as your own.
7.Business owners
Owners can request corrections, flag inaccurate data, or dispute a review through
the owners page. We correct factual errors. We do not remove
an accurate grade because it is unflattering, and grades are never for sale.
8.Availability and changes
The site is provided on an "as is" and "as available" basis. We may change,
suspend, or discontinue any part of it — including grades, cities, and features —
at any time, without notice or liability.
9.Termination
We may suspend or terminate your access to submission features if you breach
these terms. Sections 4 (licence granted), 6, and the
Liability Limitation survive termination.
10.Governing law
These terms are governed by the laws of the State of Connecticut, USA, without
regard to conflict-of-law rules. Disputes are subject to the exclusive jurisdiction
of the state and federal courts located in Connecticut.
11.Contact
Questions about these terms → legal@pizzagrades.com,
or use the form on the owners page.
Liability Limitation
A PizzaGrade is an opinion, not a fact. It is a computed
editorial estimate built from third-party review data and user submissions. It is
not an inspection, a certification, a health rating, or a guarantee about any
business, its food, or its practices. Use your own judgement.
1.No warranty
The site, the grades, and all data are provided "as is" and "as
available", without warranties of any kind, express or implied — including
merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, accuracy, and non-infringement.
We do not warrant that the site will be uninterrupted, timely, secure, or
error-free.
2.Data accuracy
Grades depend on data we do not control. Ratings, review counts, prices, hours,
addresses, delivery availability, and open/closed status come from third-party
platforms and can be stale, incomplete, or wrong. Prices marked est.
are estimates derived from price level, not menu prices. Distances and travel times
are approximations from mapping providers.
Always confirm hours, price, and availability with the business
directly before travelling or ordering.
3.Food safety, allergens, and health
PizzaGrades publishes no allergen information and no dietary guarantee.
Nothing here is a statement about ingredients, cross-contamination, gluten
handling, halal or kosher status, or nutrition. If you have a food allergy or a
medical dietary requirement, ask the business directly — do not rely on this site.
The hygiene gate described in methodology §8 removes
places with known active critical violations from the rankings. Absence from that
gate is not a clean bill of health: inspection data is published on
a lag, varies by jurisdiction, and may be missing entirely. Consult your local
health department for authoritative records.
4.Third-party services
Ordering, delivery, booking, payment, and mapping happen on third-party sites and
apps. We are not a party to those transactions and are not responsible for orders,
payments, refunds, delivery outcomes, or how those companies treat your data.
Affiliate links may earn us a commission; that never influences a grade.
5.User-submitted content
Reviews written by users are the opinions of their authors, not ours. We screen
for fraud (methodology §7) but do not verify individual
claims and are not responsible for user content. To report a review, use the
owners page.
6.For business owners
Grades and rankings are protected opinion based on disclosed methodology and
publicly available data. We correct demonstrable factual errors promptly on request.
We do not remove or raise a grade in exchange for payment, advertising, or the threat
of legal action.
7.Limitation of damages
To the fullest extent permitted by law, PizzaGrades and its operators, employees,
and contributors are not liable for any indirect, incidental, special,
consequential, exemplary, or punitive damages, or for lost profits,
revenue, data, goodwill, or business opportunity, arising from your use of — or
inability to use — the site, whether in contract, tort, or otherwise, even if
advised of the possibility.
Our total aggregate liability for all claims relating to the site is limited to
the greater of the amount you paid us in the twelve months before the claim,
or US $100.
Some jurisdictions do not allow the exclusion of certain warranties or the
limitation of certain damages. Where that applies, the exclusions above apply only
to the extent permitted, and nothing here limits liability for fraud, wilful
misconduct, or death or personal injury caused by negligence.
8.Indemnity
You agree to indemnify and hold PizzaGrades harmless from claims, losses, and
reasonable legal fees arising out of content you submit or your breach of the
Terms of Use.
9.Contact
Corrections and legal notices → legal@pizzagrades.com.
Privacy Policy
Short version. No accounts, no passwords, no ad-tracking
profiles. Your location is used to rank nearby pizzerias and is never stored on
our servers. Reviews you post are public. Your preferences live in your own
browser.
1.What we collect
| Data | Why | Where it goes |
|---|
| Precise location (only if you grant the browser prompt) | Rank pizzerias near you | Stays in your browser; sent to Google Places / mapping providers as search coordinates |
| Approximate location from IP | Fallback when you decline GPS | Looked up via a third-party IP-geolocation service; not stored by us |
| Typed address or city | Manual search | Sent to the geocoder (Nominatim / Google) to resolve coordinates |
| Review text, star rating, pizzeria name | Public reviews and grading | Stored in our Cloudflare D1 database; shown publicly |
| Salted hash of your IP address | Light duplicate/abuse control on submissions | Stored as an irreversible SHA-256 hash — the raw IP is never written to the database |
| Owner-inquiry form: contact you supply, message | Reply to corrections and claims | Stored in the same database, not published |
| Preferences (radius, mode, sort order, dismissed prompts) | Remember your setup | localStorage in your browser only |
| Standard server logs at our CDN/Workers | Security and abuse prevention | Cloudflare, short retention |
We do not collect names, passwords, payment details, contacts, photos from your
device, or health data. There are no PizzaGrades accounts.
2.Children
PizzaGrades is not directed at children under 13 and we do not knowingly collect
their personal information. If you believe a child has submitted data, write to us
and we will delete it.
3.Third parties that receive data
- Google Maps Platform (Places, Geocoding, Maps) — receives search coordinates and queries
- OpenStreetMap / Nominatim — fallback geocoding of typed addresses
- Yelp Fusion, and TripAdvisor when enabled — receive place lookups through our proxy Workers, not your identity
- Cloudflare — hosting, Workers, and the D1 review database
- An IP-geolocation provider — receives your IP when GPS is declined
- Google AdSense — not currently active. If ads are enabled later, this section and the notice below will be updated before any ad script loads.
- Affiliate/order partners (Slice, Grubhub, Uber Eats) — receive a referral tag only when you click through
Each operates under its own privacy policy. We do not sell or share your
personal information for cross-context behavioural advertising.
4.Cookies and local storage
PizzaGrades sets no advertising or analytics cookies of its own. We use
localStorage for your preferences and locally-cached reviews — clearing
your browser's site data removes it. Third-party map and ordering embeds may set
their own cookies under their policies.
5.Retention
- Public reviews and IP hashes: kept while the review is published
- Owner inquiries: kept up to 24 months, then deleted
- Location: not retained by us at all — used for the search, then discarded
- Edge logs: retained by Cloudflare on its standard short schedule
6.Your rights
Wherever you live, you can ask us to access, correct, or delete
data you submitted, or to stop processing it. Because we hold no account, deletion
requests need enough detail to find the record — typically the pizzeria name and
the approximate date of your review.
California (CCPA/CPRA): you have rights to know, delete, correct,
and to opt out of sale/sharing — we do not sell or share, so there is nothing to opt
out of. We will not discriminate against you for exercising a right.
EEA/UK (GDPR): our lawful bases are legitimate interests
(running and securing the site, publishing reviews) and consent (precise location,
which you can revoke in your browser at any time). You may lodge a complaint with
your supervisory authority.
Requests → privacy@pizzagrades.com.
We respond within 30 days.
7.Security
Traffic is served over HTTPS. Review submissions are validated and rate-limited
at the edge, and identity signals are hashed with a server-side secret rather than
stored raw. No system is perfectly secure; we cannot guarantee absolute security.
8.International transfers
PizzaGrades is operated from the United States and served from Cloudflare's
global edge. Using the site means your data may be processed in the US and other
countries.
9.Changes
We will update the date above when this policy changes, and describe material
changes on the site before they take effect.