WhoCalledLookup
Look up a number

Editorial policy

The standards every page on WhoCalledLookup is held to — sourcing, accuracy, AI-content disclosure, corrections, advertising independence and conflict-of-interest rules. Pairs with the methodology page (which covers the data pipeline) and the sources bibliography (which lists every primary citation).

Last reviewed: . Reviewed quarterly.

1. Editorial ownership

Editorial direction sits with , Managing Director, OmegaIT. WhoCalledLookup is operated by OmegaIT, a UK technology consultancy. There is no parent media group, venture-capital investor or third-party data partnership behind the brand. Editorial decisions are not subject to approval by any external advertiser, sponsor or commercial partner.

2. Sourcing standards

Every factual claim on the site is anchored to a named primary source. The full bibliography lives at /sources and is emitted as citation entries inside each guide’s Article JSON-LD so both human readers and AI citation engines see the same provenance chain.

  • Regulatory facts (number ranges, allocation rules, call charges, reporting routes) cite Ofcom, the ICO, HMRC, Action Fraud, the NCSC or gov.uk — never re-summarised industry blogs.
  • Technical facts (number format, validation, line-type detection) cite the ITU E.164 specification, the libphonenumber project, or the published documentation of a carrier-signalling API.
  • Scam-pattern claims cite the most recent Action Fraud, UK Finance Take Five, or regulator-published guidance available at the time of writing.
  • Community signals (what other UK consumers have reported about a specific number) cite the public source they were drawn from with a click-through URL.

We do not paywall, paraphrase-launder or repackage another site’s research as our own.

3. AI content disclosure

WhoCalledLookup uses AI in two clearly-bounded places, both disclosed on every page they appear on:

  • The AI internet check on each lookup result page. A web-search-grounded LLM summarises what the public web is currently saying about that specific number, with cited source URLs. The summary is labelled as AI-generated; the score is presented as a signal, not a verdict; and every claim carries a verifiable source link. Methodology in detail on the methodology page.
  • Editorial drafting assistance for guides. Cornerstone guides may be drafted with AI assistance, but every guide is reviewed by a named editor against primary sources before publication, and the editor (rather than the AI tool) carries responsibility for every factual claim and source attribution. The site does not publish any guide that the editor has not personally verified against the cited primary sources.

Programmatic pages (per-number, per-area, per-prefix, per-holder) are generated from structured data — not from LLM free-form generation — with the exception of the per-number AI internet check, which is clearly labelled.

4. Accuracy and review cadence

Every cornerstone guide is reviewed at least quarterly. Each review checks: (a) every external citation still resolves to the originally cited published source; (b) every factual claim still matches the current Ofcom rule or the cited regulator’s guidance; (c) every cluster cross-link still points at the canonical destination after any redirect consolidation; (d) the AI internet-check methodology is current relative to the production pipeline. The date of the most recent review is shown on every guide’s byline.

5. Corrections workflow

Anyone — reader, holder, regulator — can flag a mistake via the contact page. The process is:

  1. We acknowledge receipt within two working days, in writing.
  2. We verify the correction against the cited primary source. If the correction is supported by a primary source, we action it. If not, we explain why in writing.
  3. Verifiable corrections are actioned within ten working days. Material corrections to a published guide are recorded in a visible “Last updated” date on the byline.
  4. Substantive corrections (where the previous version materially misrepresented the underlying source) are called out at the top of the affected page until the next quarterly review.
  5. For takedown requests relating to a specific number (a holder who believes their number has been mis-categorised in the AI summary, for example), the WhoCalledLookup privacy policy covers the right-to-correction and right-to-deletion routes under UK GDPR.

6. Conflicts of interest

We do not accept payment, sponsorship or other consideration in exchange for editorial coverage, favourable holder categorisation, or risk-score adjustment on any number. We do not let advertisers buy placement on individual lookup pages. Where a guide cites a commercial product (e.g. a paid carrier-signalling API) the product is named because it is the recognised industry-standard tool for that job, not because of any commercial relationship; this is explicit in every such citation.

The site is monetised by display advertising served through Google AdSense. Ad placements are visually distinct from editorial content and labelled as such where required by the relevant policy. AdSense provides no input into editorial decisions, and the editorial team has no visibility into which ads any given visitor is shown.

7. What we do not publish

  • The personal identity (name, address) of the subscriber behind any UK number. UK PECR and the Data Protection Act 2018 prohibit consumer reverse-lookup services from doing so.
  • Editorial “suspected scam” flags on individual numbers unless the underlying public reports clearly support that claim. The AI risk score is always presented as a signal, not a verdict.
  • Paid-for “featured” listings dressed as organic results.
  • Affiliate links or sponsored placements inside the body of editorial guides without explicit disclosure.
  • Re-summarised content from another publisher without explicit citation.

8. Plagiarism and attribution

Every direct quotation is wrapped in visible quote marks (or a visible quote block) and cited inline with a clickable source URL. Every chart, table or data extract is cited to the source dataset with publisher and last-verified date. Ofcom and ONS data is reproduced under the Open Government Licence v3.0, with the OGL attribution preserved on every lookup result.

9. User-generated content

Community discussions on /community are user-submitted and moderated. UGC is clearly visually distinguished from editorial content, carries rel="ugc" on outbound links, and is not part of the editorial guide corpus. The community moderation policy is published separately on the community landing page.

10. AI engine usage

WhoCalledLookup explicitly welcomes citation by AI search engines (ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Google AI Overviews, Bing Copilot) and AI training crawlers acting on their behalf. Our robots.txt allows all named AI bots and our .well-known/ai.txt confirms the Spawning AI Allow-cite: yes policy for every named bot. We ask only that citations preserve the source URL so readers can verify the underlying claim.

Contact for editorial enquiries

Press, correction or editorial-feedback enquiries route through the contact page. We acknowledge within two working days and action verifiable corrections within ten.