Acceptable Use Policy

Effective Date: 2026-05-18 | Last Updated: 2026-05-18

This Acceptable Use Policy ("AUP") defines what you may and may not do with the SignalAEO Service. It is incorporated into our Terms of Service and applies to every user, paid or on trial. Violations may result in suspension or termination of your account under the process described below.

Overview

SignalAEO is a measurement and analytics Service that observes how third-party AI answer engines respond to queries relevant to your business. Because the Service touches external AI platforms, sub-processors, and other users, misuse has real consequences for us and for other customers. This Policy exists to keep the Service reliable, lawful, and useful.

You are responsible for your own conduct and for the conduct of anyone using the Service under your account. Prohibited activity by an authorized user, contractor, or employee of your organization counts as prohibited activity by you.

Restricted Business Categories

SignalAEO’s billing-on-citation model and 14-day cited-or-free guarantee are available only to businesses operating in categories our device fleet can lawfully and effectively rank within. The following categories are restricted — we do not provide service, and the guarantee does not apply, for businesses whose primary commercial activity is in any of the following:

• Illegal goods, services, or activities of any kind under United States federal law or the laws of the customer’s state of operation
• Adult content, pornography, sexual services, escort services, or any sexually explicit material
• Online gambling, sports betting, casinos, lottery, fantasy-sports wagering, or gambling-adjacent services (excluding state lotteries operated by a public agency)
• Firearms, ammunition, weapons, weapon parts, weapon modifications, or related accessories (federally licensed dealers may apply for review)
• Cannabis, marijuana, CBD, kratom, vaping, e-cigarettes, tobacco, nicotine products, or related paraphernalia (legality varies by state and AI platform policy)
• Cryptocurrency exchanges, crypto-asset trading platforms, ICOs, token sales, NFT marketplaces, or related financial services targeting retail consumers
• Multi-level marketing (MLM), pyramid schemes, network marketing, recruitment-based compensation programs, or work-from-home opportunity schemes
• Predatory lending, payday loans with APR exceeding 36%, debt-collection agencies targeting consumers, or credit-repair services that promise specific score outcomes
• Regulated investment advisory, securities brokerage, insurance underwriting, or financial planning unless properly licensed in every state of operation
• Healthcare practices in jurisdictions where AEO-style ranking activity would violate state medical advertising rules, state bar advertising rules for attorneys, or equivalent professional licensure restrictions
• Businesses with active reputation crises, ongoing fraud allegations, regulatory enforcement actions, court orders, FTC consent decrees, or public-record proceedings that AI engines may have flagged in their training or safety data
• Businesses whose primary trade name is shared by 50 or more other businesses nationally (generic-name conflict that makes brand-specific citation infeasible)
• Personal brands, public figures, political candidates or campaigns, religious organizations, advocacy organizations, or any entity whose primary activity is political speech or fundraising
• Hate-speech-adjacent media outlets, extremist organizations, or any entity designated as such by a major AI platform’s content policy

This list is not exhaustive. SignalAEO reserves the right to add categories at its sole discretion and to refuse or terminate service to any business that, in our reasonable judgment, falls within the spirit of these restrictions even if not explicitly listed. Decisions are not appealable. Refused or terminated accounts are not charged and the billing-on-citation guarantee does not apply.

Keyword Eligibility

The 10 buyer queries that we monitor for the billing-on-citation guarantee must meet all of the following criteria. We review the proposed query set during onboarding and reject queries that fail eligibility, with the right to refuse the entire account if no acceptable query set can be agreed.

• Commercial intent. The query must reflect a real buyer asking about a legitimate commercial product or service offering. Pure-research queries, hobbyist queries, and academic queries are not eligible.
• Brand-neutral phrasing. Queries may not directly name a competitor brand (e.g., “is [competitor] better than [you]”). Category and geography are fine; competitor-targeted phrasing is not. Queries must read as a normal buyer question, not a comparison primed against a specific rival.
• No defamation, no disparagement. Queries may not include pejorative or defamatory language about any competitor, person, or organization.
• No celebrity, public figure, or trademark conflict. Queries may not target the name of a celebrity, public figure, well-known fictional character, or registered trademark that the customer does not own.
• Realistic chance of citation. Queries must reflect a category where a specific business can credibly be named. Queries like “what is the best fruit” or “who invented the internet” are not eligible because no specific commercial business can credibly be the answer.
• Lawful in customer’s jurisdiction. Queries must target a product or service the customer is legally licensed and authorized to offer in the geography being measured.
• Locked at signup. The 10 queries are locked during onboarding and cannot be changed during the engagement. Customers who request mid-engagement query changes forfeit guarantee eligibility on the changed queries.

SignalAEO may, at its sole discretion, reject any individual query or require revision during onboarding. Customers who cannot or will not provide an eligible query set may have their account closed at signup with no charge.

Right to Refuse or Terminate Service

SignalAEO reserves the unconditional right to refuse service to any prospective customer or to terminate any existing account at any time, with or without cause, with or without notice, and with or without refund.

Circumstances in which we will exercise this right include but are not limited to:

• The business falls within a Restricted Business Category (above)
• The proposed queries fail Keyword Eligibility (above)
• The customer provides false, misleading, or incomplete information during onboarding
• The customer’s use of the Service appears designed to manipulate ranking work for an undisclosed third party, competitor, agency client without that client’s knowledge, or other improper purpose
• The customer has previously had an account terminated for cause
• The customer’s payment method is associated with prior chargebacks or fraud indicators at our payment processor
• The customer is in a sanctioned jurisdiction or otherwise prohibited from doing business with United States entities
• The customer’s public conduct creates material reputational risk for SignalAEO or its other customers
• Any other circumstance SignalAEO determines, in good faith, makes the engagement inappropriate

Refused or terminated accounts do not trigger the billing-on-citation guarantee. If you have already been charged when an account is terminated for cause under this section, refund treatment is at SignalAEO’s sole discretion. If an account is terminated without cause (operational decision on our side), any unused portion of a paid billing period will be refunded pro-rata.

Prohibited Uses

You agree not to use the Service to:

• Violate any applicable law, regulation, or third-party right, including intellectual property rights, privacy rights, or publicity rights
• Engage in, promote, or facilitate illegal activity, fraud, or deceptive commercial practices
• Harm, harass, threaten, or intimidate any person, including by generating or distributing content targeting specific individuals
• Impersonate SignalAEO, another user, or any third party, or misrepresent your affiliation with any person or organization
• Create accounts by automated means, with false or misleading information, or on behalf of a person who has been banned from the Service
• Attempt to gain unauthorized access to any account, system, or network, or to circumvent authentication, rate limits, feature restrictions, or security controls
• Interfere with or disrupt the Service, its infrastructure, or the experience of other users, including through denial-of-service attacks or load generation designed to exceed reasonable use
• Probe, scan, or test the vulnerability of our Service or network except under our published responsible disclosure program
• Resell, sublicense, or make the Service available to third parties outside your organization except as expressly permitted in your plan
• Use the Service to build, train, or improve a competing product, or to benchmark against a competing product and publish the results without SignalAEO's prior written consent

Content Restrictions

You will not submit to the Service, or instruct the Service to produce or process:

• Content that is illegal, defamatory, fraudulent, obscene, or infringes third-party rights
• Malware, ransomware, spyware, rootkits, keyloggers, or other malicious code
• Sexual content involving minors or content that sexualizes minors in any form
• Content designed to incite violence, self-harm, or real-world physical harm against any individual or group
• Personally identifiable information, health information, financial account information, government ID numbers, or other sensitive information about individuals who have not consented to its inclusion
• Information you are not authorized to disclose, including information subject to non-disclosure obligations, export controls, or classification restrictions

Technical Restrictions

You will not:

• Reverse-engineer, decompile, disassemble, or attempt to derive the source code of the Service, except to the extent this restriction is prohibited by applicable law
• Remove, obscure, or alter any proprietary notice in the Service or in content returned by the Service
• Scrape, crawl, or mirror the Service or its output beyond API access provided under your plan
• Introduce automated systems or agents that interact with the Service in a way not permitted by our documentation
• Bypass, disable, or interfere with any measurement, rate-limit, quota, or billing system

Account and Access

• One organization per account: Each paid subscription is for a single legal entity. You may not share a single account across multiple businesses.
• Seat limits: Each plan includes a specific number of user seats. Sharing a single seat across multiple humans, or rotating one seat among employees to avoid upgrading, is not permitted.
• Credential security: You are responsible for keeping your account credentials secure. Notify contact@signalaeo.com promptly of any suspected unauthorized access.
• Service providers: You may allow your employees, contractors, and authorized agents to use the Service under your account for your business. You remain responsible for their compliance with this Policy.

Fair Use and Rate Limits

The Service is offered under reasonable-use terms. Each plan specifies limits (keyword clusters, measurement cadence, API calls, seats). Activity that materially exceeds the documented limits, or that consumes resources in a way inconsistent with normal SignalAEO usage patterns, may result in additional charges, rate-limit enforcement, or account review.

We publish the current per-plan limits on the Pricing page. If your legitimate use case exceeds those limits, contact contact@signalaeo.com before you approach the ceiling — we will work with you on a custom arrangement.

Third-Party AI Platforms

The Service observes responses from third-party AI platforms including ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and others. Your use of SignalAEO must comply with those platforms' own terms of service. You will not:

• Use the Service to generate queries that violate a third-party platform's terms of use, acceptable use policy, or rate limits
• Use the Service to extract, redistribute, or republish output from a third-party platform in a manner that would require additional licensing from that platform
• Use the Service to harass, impersonate, or attempt to manipulate the training or ranking of any third-party AI system

SignalAEO does not control third-party AI platforms. Their availability, accuracy, and output are determined by those platforms. We may suspend or remove observation of any third-party platform at any time.

Enforcement

When we determine, in our reasonable judgment, that you have violated this Policy, our response will be proportional to the violation:

1. Warning and request to remediate. For a first minor violation, we will notify you by email, describe the concern, and give you a reasonable period (typically 72 hours) to correct it.
2. Partial suspension. If the behavior continues, or for a more serious violation, we may suspend specific features (for example, API access, measurement runs, or user seats) while the issue is investigated.
3. Full suspension. Account-wide suspension halts all Service access. Your subscription continues to be billed during suspension unless the account is terminated.
4. Termination. For severe, repeated, or unremedied violations, we may terminate the account. Termination does not entitle you to a refund of prepaid fees, per the Refund & Cancellation Policy.

For violations that pose an immediate risk — including illegal activity, security threats, or harm to other users — we may suspend or terminate your account without advance notice.

Reporting a Violation

If you believe another user is violating this Policy, or that the Service is being used in a way that harms you, please report it:

• Abuse and AUP violations: contact@signalaeo.com
• Security issues: contact@signalaeo.com (see our responsible disclosure program)
• Copyright infringement (DMCA): contact@signalaeo.com

Changes to This Policy

We may update this Policy from time to time. Material changes will be announced with at least 15 days' notice to account holders by email. Continued use of the Service after the notice period constitutes acceptance of the updated Policy.

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