How this directory is built

The catalog is built for independent rooms, not national restaurant chains. A venue can appear when we have a name, a US city and state, and either a street address or map coordinates. Owner-claimed profiles can add hours, amenities, menus, and photos; unclaimed rooms still appear when the public record is strong enough to help a drinker find the door.

Only reviews from real people count toward on-page star averages, city and state rankings, Taproom of the Week, press Top 10 embeds, and aggregateRating / review markup. Seeded or editorial sample copy is excluded. If a listing has no published visitor reviews, we output no aggregate rating at all. “Verified drinker” means an authenticated account that checked in at that venue — not a catalog flag.

City hubs sort independent venues first, then by live visitor rating and review count when those exist. The same order powers city Top 10 press embeds. A “verified independent” listing flag is not a Google star, health score, or paid badge. Completeness stamps on listing pages show whether address, phone, website, map pin, hours, amenities, claim status, and live reviews are present.

Permanently closed and in-planning venues stay in the catalog so old links do not go silent, but they are labeled and excluded from active counts, city/state totals, and “taprooms near me” style results. Do not treat an active-count headline as the raw size of the underlying file.

City hubs and amenity rankings stay online for humans even when the local set is small. If a hub has fewer than 1 strong listings — active venues with a name, city, state, and an address or coordinates — we serve it with noindex,follow and omit it from the XML sitemap. We do not 404 thin city pages. Empty vibe rankings 404 because there is nothing to rank. Individual listing URLs stay indexable. 48-hour city guides only publish when a city has at least four active venues.

Recurring event coverage is not dense enough to mint Event pages or Event rich results. The Events Radar remains a product surface. We will not invent event URLs or schema until that catalog is real.