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Legal

Acceptable Use Policy

This is the current CitePatch Acceptable Use Policy. It forms part of your agreement with CitePatch S.L.: breaking a rule here is breaking the Terms of Service. It covers what you must be authorized to act on, how CitePatch may and may not be pointed at the web, what you must not publish through it, and what happens when someone crosses those lines. It took effect on 8 September 2026 and applies to every account, including free audits. It has not yet been reviewed by outside counsel, but it is our real, enforceable position, not a placeholder.

What this policy covers, and who it binds

This policy applies to everyone who uses CitePatch: account owners, the members they invite, and anyone running a free audit without an account. It is part of the agreement between you and CitePatch S.L., and a breach of it is a breach of the Terms of Service.

  • Account owners are responsible for the members they invite and for what those members submit, approve, or publish.
  • If you use CitePatch on behalf of an employer or a client, that organization is bound by this policy too.
  • Where this policy and the Terms of Service overlap, both apply; where the Terms are more specific — billing, liability, termination — the Terms govern.

Point CitePatch only at what you are authorized to act on

Every domain, repository, and integration you connect is a claim of authority. Making that claim falsely is the fastest way to lose your account.

  • Submit a domain only if you own it or the owner has authorized you to act on it. Watching how AI assistants describe a competitor is what the product is for; connecting a competitor's domain for crawling or publishing is not.
  • Connect a repository, CMS, or storage account only with credentials issued to you, for that purpose, by someone entitled to issue them.
  • A free audit is subject to the same rule: run it on a domain you are entitled to have audited.
  • Never use CitePatch to collect, store, or test credentials that are not yours, and never share your own account access outside your organization.

How CitePatch reaches the web, and what you must not make it do

CitePatch crawls pages and queries AI assistants on your behalf. Those requests carry our name and our addresses, so misusing them is our problem as much as yours.

  • Our crawler honours robots.txt and backs off by design. Do not attempt to make it ignore those limits, disguise what it is, or route it so that it appears to be ordinary user traffic.
  • Do not use CitePatch to reach parts of a site that require authentication, that are not publicly linked, or that the owner has evidently closed off.
  • Do not use it to get past a CAPTCHA, an anti-bot control, a paywall, or a login, by hand or by automation.
  • Do not use it as a general-purpose scraper of third-party sites, AI assistants, or search engines, beyond the measurement and crawling the product is built to do.
  • Do not open extra accounts, false identities, or throwaway domains to work around plan limits, credit limits, or an earlier suspension.

Content you must not draft or publish through CitePatch

CitePatch drafts patches; you approve them and they publish. Approval is the moment responsibility for that content becomes yours, and this is where the line sits.

  • No content that is illegal where you or your readers are, that infringes someone else's copyright, trademark, or other rights, or that you simply do not have the right to publish.
  • No malware, exploit code, phishing pages, or anything built to compromise a reader or their device.
  • No harassment, threats, or content that targets a person or a group with abuse.
  • No impersonation: do not publish content that presents itself as coming from another company, product, or person.
  • No fabricated reviews, testimonials, case studies, customer counts, awards, or certifications — including structured data that asserts any of them falsely.
  • No pages mass-produced only to influence an AI assistant or a search engine, with nothing in them for a human reader.

Personal and sensitive data

Prompts, brand facts, and drafted content pass through the model providers listed in our Privacy Policy. Keep out of them what does not belong there.

  • Do not put special-category personal data — health, biometrics, religion, sexual orientation, political opinions, trade union membership — into prompts, brand facts, or content you submit for drafting.
  • Do not put card numbers, government identifiers, passwords, or API keys into free-text fields anywhere in the product.
  • Do not use CitePatch to profile identifiable private individuals. Measuring how assistants describe a company is the product; measuring how they describe a person is not.
  • For ordinary personal data you do submit — a colleague's name on a page we crawl, for instance — you remain the controller, and the Data Processing Addendum governs how we handle it on your behalf.

Do not attack the model layer or third-party sources

This product exists because AI assistants can be wrong about a brand. Using it to make them wrong about someone else is out of bounds.

  • No prompt injection: do not publish, or ask CitePatch to draft, content whose purpose is to override the instructions of an AI assistant, ours or anyone else's.
  • No source manipulation: do not edit, or try to edit, third-party pages, wikis, forums, or review sites in order to move what an assistant says about you or about a competitor.
  • Do not submit or publish content that misrepresents a competitor's product, pricing, or security posture.
  • Do not probe the product to extract our prompts, model configuration, or internal scoring, and do not resell CitePatch's output as your own measurement service without a written agreement.

Keeping the service standing up

CitePatch runs shared infrastructure and pays per call for the AI work it does. Abusing either is felt directly by every other customer.

  • Do not circumvent rate limits, credit limits, or plan quotas, and do not automate the product in a way designed to consume disproportionate resources.
  • Do not scan, penetration-test, or load-test the service without our written permission, and do not reverse engineer, decompile, or otherwise try to derive its source code.
  • If you find a security vulnerability, report it to [email protected] before doing anything else with it. We will not pursue a researcher who reports in good faith, stops at proof, and gives us reasonable time to fix it.
  • Do not interfere with another customer's account, data, or use of the service.

How we enforce this, and what we do not detect

We would rather be plain about the limits of our enforcement than imply a screening system we do not run.

  • CitePatch does not pre-screen the domains you connect, the prompts you write, or the patches you approve. Nothing here is caught automatically before it happens.
  • We act on reports, on abuse signals from our own infrastructure, and on complaints from the sites and platforms we reach. A person reviews each one; a model does not decide.
  • Depending on severity we may ask you to fix the problem, disable a specific domain or integration, suspend the account, or terminate it. We suspend without warning only when leaving the account running would cause ongoing harm.
  • We keep the records, logs, and content relevant to an enforcement decision for as long as resolving it requires, and we hand them to a third party only where the law requires it or to defend a legal claim.

Reporting abuse, and appealing a decision

To report a CitePatch account you believe is breaking this policy — including a crawl or a published page that affects a site you operate — write to [email protected] with the domain and enough detail to identify it.

  • We aim to acknowledge a report within two business days, and to tell you the outcome once we have acted.
  • If we suspend or terminate your account we will tell you which rule we applied. You can appeal by replying to that notice or writing to [email protected], and wherever our size allows, someone other than the person who made the original decision will review it.
  • Nothing here limits your right to complain to a supervisory authority, or ours to act on a court order.

Changes to this policy

These rules will get more specific as the product grows and we see how it actually gets misused.

  • We may update this policy. If a change materially widens what is prohibited, we will notify account owners by email or in-product notice before it takes effect.
  • The date this version took effect is stated at the top of this page.
  • Continuing to use CitePatch after that date means you accept the updated policy.