What's the difference between Scanned, Certified, and Certified Gold?
Scanned means a store cleared an automated scan at 70+ and gets a monochrome seal with just the score. Certified requires 80+ plus a human reviewer and domain verification, and unlocks the full-colour seal with a reviewer attestation. Certified Gold requires 90+ sustained for six continuous months, plus everything Certified includes, and adds a gold seal stamped with the date the streak began.
The three tiers exist because a single pass/fail badge would flatten a meaningful difference: a store that just cleared 70 and a store that's held 95 for a year are not the same kind of trustworthy, and the badge should say so at a glance. Scanned is the entry tier — an automated score of 70 or higher, rendered as a monochrome seal showing the number and nothing more. It reflects what the 29 rule-based detectors found, with no human involved.
Certified raises the bar in two ways at once: the score threshold goes up to 80, and a human reviewer checks edge cases the automated detectors can't judge on their own — a review widget that's actually fake, a policy page that exists but is unreachable in practice, a badge on another site copied without permission. The reviewer's findings, including any overrides, are recorded in a permanent audit trail, and domain verification confirms the store claiming the score actually controls the domain being scored. Certified stores get the full-colour seal with a visible reviewer attestation on their verify page.
Certified Gold is a consistency bar, not just a score bar: 90 or higher, sustained continuously for six months, on top of everything Certified requires. A store can hit 90 once and slip — Gold means it didn't. The seal reflects that by stamping the month the streak began, so anyone looking at the badge can see not just the current number but how long it's been true. Full requirements and seal treatments for all three tiers are on the badge page, including how the underlying live-embed mechanics keep any tier from being screenshotted and reused after a score changes.