Methodology

Every live figure and every article on Promo.co.uk is built on data we can name and a check we can describe. This page sets out exactly where the numbers come from, what they do and don't measure, and the gates a story has to clear before it goes live.

Where the figures come from

Fuel prices: GOV.UK Fuel Finder

UK mean unleaded and diesel prices are drawn from the official GOV.UK Fuel Finder service, accessed through fuel.co.uk (part of the same group), which itself ingests the government feed every 30 minutes. Nothing is estimated: the figures shown are the same official means fuel.co.uk publishes.

Private number plate activity: official DVLA new-reg data and newreg.co.uk

DVLA new-reg mark figures (sold-or-removed counts, initials, prefixes, numbers, area codes and word plates) come from a daily feed published by New Reg, a DVLA registrations dealer, covering the pool of marks available for private purchase. This is a transaction and pool-movement count, not a measure of buyer demand such as searches or enquiries, which we don't currently have data for.

One deliberate honesty note: a mark leaving the available pool means it was sold or withdrawn. We never claim it was assigned to a specific buyer, because the feed cannot tell the difference. We label this “sold or removed”, not “sold”, for exactly that reason. Similarly, a two-letter initials figure (e.g. “SM”) is only ever published when it can be summed correctly across every three-letter combination that reduces to it (SAM, SBM, SCM and so on) using the full underlying event feed, never estimated from a shortlist of top combinations, which would understate the true figure and mislabel it as exact.

How an article is verified

Every Promo story must clear a truth gate before publishing: confirmed by an official source, or corroborated by several independent sources. We only ever name and link official, government sources in an article's verification panel. Commercial outlets that merely corroborate a story are counted toward that verification but never named, since their reporting is not itself an authoritative record.

Beyond sourcing, every draft is automatically checked for internal consistency before it can go live: a figure quoted in the headline or standfirst must also appear in the body, near-duplicate stories are blocked, and where an article names a specific vehicle registration, the claim is checked against DVSA and DVLA records. A separate screen holds back any draft that makes a potentially damaging claim about a named person or company for human review before publication, rather than assessing it automatically.

These same checks run again periodically against everything already live, so a story that later fails one of them is taken down, not left to stand. See our corrections log for what that has actually caught.

Limits, honestly stated

A correction or an unpublish is recorded the moment it happens, but it may take a short time to propagate everywhere the story was shared or cached externally. We do not delete a corrected article outright. It is held back for review, and the record of why is public on the corrections log.

Questions or something looks wrong

If a figure or a claim on Promo.co.uk looks wrong, tell us: email us. We would rather correct it publicly than leave it standing.