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The Pet Sitter

Verification and badges, explained

September 6, 2026

Badges do the selling before you ever speak to an owner. This page is the full glossary: what each badge on a profile means, how it is earned, and how to bring your existing reputation with you if you are arriving from another platform. It is written for sitters, but owners choosing a sitter can read every badge the same way.

One rule above all: badges are computed, never bought. Each one is derived from a recorded fact on your account — human profile approval, a reviewed document, a confirmed review, or a setting you switched on. There is no way to pay for one, and no way for us to gift one.

Trust badges

These are the ones owners look for first. Each badge names the exact check behind it; one badge never implies another.

  • Verified Sitter — your profile has been manually reviewed and approved. You request that review from your dashboard once your page has the essentials. Approval is required before search engines may index it and before it can appear in our future in-product search. The search-engine visibility setting must also be enabled. Your profile page and booking link still work from signup for anyone you share them with. The review looks at your bio, photos, services and rates as a whole — what vetting actually checks is public. This badge does not mean that we checked your identity or criminal history.
  • Identity Verified — you uploaded a government-issued photo ID under Account → Verification and our team reviewed it by hand. The document is stored privately and never shown publicly; profile approval never grants this badge automatically.
  • Verified on another platform — you had at least one review imported from another platform (Rover, Mad Paws, Pawshake and others) and an admin verified it against the source. This badge exists so your track record does not reset to zero when you move. See "Bringing your reviews across" below.
  • Police checked — you uploaded a police check under Account → Verification and it passed review. Owners consistently rank this as the single most reassuring signal.
  • Insured — you uploaded proof of insurance and it passed review. Not sure whether you need cover? Start with do you need pet-sitting insurance?
  • First aid — you uploaded evidence of a pet first-aid certification and it passed review.

Care specialty badges

These come straight from the care settings on your profile — switch a specialty on and the badge appears, switch it off and it goes.

  • Large dogs — you accept dogs over 20 kg.
  • Elderly pets — you accept senior dogs or cats, with the patience and routines they need.
  • Puppies & kittens — you take the young ones, house-training chaos included.
  • Exotic pets — birds, reptiles, rabbits and other non-standard companions.
  • Medication admin — you can give oral medication or injections on schedule.
  • Reactive dogs — you accept dogs that need careful handling around triggers.

Only claim a specialty you genuinely have. The badge gets you the enquiry; the meet and greet, and the booking that follows, test whether it was true.

Logistics badges

  • Meet & greet — you offer a no-obligation introduction before a first booking. Owners love this; it is the single easiest badge to earn.
  • Pickup & drop-off — you can collect and return pets.
  • Cash and Electronic — how you accept payment. Owners pay you directly on this platform, so these badges tell them up front whether cash, bank transfer, PayID or PayPal will work. Set them (and your payment details) in your profile's payment methods.

Bringing your reviews across

If you built a reputation on another platform, it should not evaporate because you left. The import works like this:

  1. From your dashboard, submit a link to your public profile on the other platform, or a screenshot of the reviews.
  2. An admin (with AI assistance) verifies the reviews against the source — that they exist, that they are yours, and that the text matches.
  3. Verified reviews appear on your profile with their source platform recorded — displayed honestly as imported, never disguised as native reviews.
  4. Your first verified imported review earns the Verified on another platform badge.

Be clear about what this is: a verified copy shown with attribution. It does not move the original review or transfer your star rating — no platform allows that. What it does is stop your years of five-star history being invisible at the exact moment you need them most. If you are weighing up the move, what actually happens to your reviews and clients when you leave covers the whole picture.

For owners: how to read badges

The Verified Sitter badge means the profile was manually reviewed and approved; it is not an identity or background check. Police-check, insurance and first-aid badges each refer only to the specific evidence we reviewed. Identity Verified is separate and is awarded only after we manually review a privately uploaded identity document. Specialty and logistics badges are the sitter's own declared settings — the meet and greet is where you confirm the fit for your pet. A sitter with fewer badges is not necessarily worse; a new sitter may simply not have submitted optional evidence yet. Reviews plus clearly defined badges together tell the real story.