Acceptable Use Policy

Who this policy binds, and how it fits the Terms

This Acceptable Use Policy forms part of the Terms of Service and applies to everyone who uses RankX AI: the account holder, every user invited into an account, and every client workspace an agency operates. Breaching it is a breach of the Terms.

If you operate an agency account, you are responsible for your clients’ compliance with this policy in the workspaces you manage. You may pass this document to them directly; it is written to be readable on its own.

We may update this policy as new patterns of misuse appear. Changes take effect when published, and material ones are notified as described in the Terms. The date at the top of this page is the current version.

Only point the platform at things you are entitled to

This is the most important rule in this document, and the one most often broken by accident. RankX AI crawls websites, reads connected analytics accounts and writes to connected content management systems. Every one of those actions is taken on your authority, and you must actually have that authority.

You must not:

• run a site audit or crawl against a website you do not own and are not authorised in writing to audit, beyond the light, publicly-available checks that the free tools perform on a single page;
• connect a Google Search Console property, a Google Analytics property or a WordPress installation without the owner’s authorisation;
• use credentials that were not issued to you, or continue to use access after a client relationship ends;
• publish to, modify or delete content on a site you are not authorised to change;
• circumvent a website’s robots.txt directives, rate limits, paywall or access controls, or crawl a site at a rate that degrades it for its own visitors.

Competitor analysis is expressly permitted and is a core purpose of the platform. Reading a competitor’s public pages, tracking their rankings and measuring how they appear in AI answers are all legitimate. Crawling their site aggressively, or connecting their accounts, is not.

Unlawful and harmful use

You must not use RankX AI to:

• break any law that applies to you or to us, including data protection, consumer protection, advertising, intellectual property, defamation, export control and sanctions law;
• infringe anyone’s copyright, trade marks, database rights, confidential information or privacy;
• produce or distribute content that is defamatory, harassing, threatening, or that incites violence or hatred against people on the basis of a protected characteristic;
• produce or distribute child sexual abuse material, non-consensual intimate imagery, or content sexualising minors, in any form. There is no warning ladder for this: accounts are terminated immediately and reported to the relevant authorities;
• impersonate a person, a business or a public body, including by generating content presented as being written or endorsed by someone who did not write or endorse it;
• run phishing, fraud, pyramid schemes or deceptive commercial practices, or promote them;
• process special category personal data or criminal offence data through the platform, which has no feature designed to handle it and no safeguards appropriate to it.

Search and AI answer manipulation

RankX AI exists to help you earn visibility by making better, more findable content. It is not a manipulation tool, and using it as one puts your own domains at risk before it puts anything of ours at risk.

You must not use the platform to:

• generate scaled content abuse, meaning large volumes of pages produced primarily to manipulate rankings rather than to help readers, whether or not a human touches them on the way out;
• run site reputation abuse, meaning publishing third-party content on a host site largely to exploit that site’s ranking signals;
• publish expired domain abuse, meaning buying an expired domain for its history and repopulating it with unrelated content;
• cloak, doorway or otherwise show search engines and AI crawlers something different from what a person sees;
• generate fake reviews, fabricated testimonials, invented statistics or made-up citations, or content that attributes claims to sources that do not support them;
• produce content on medical, legal, financial or safety topics intended for publication without review by someone qualified to check it;
• deliberately misrepresent a competitor, or generate content whose purpose is to damage a competitor’s reputation rather than to advance your own.

Volume alone is not the test. Publishing a hundred well-researched, reviewed, genuinely useful pages is fine. Publishing ten pages nobody read before they went live, on topics you have no standing in, is not. The distinguishing question is whether a real reader is better off for the page existing.

Reviewing what the AI produces

Every piece of AI-generated output on this platform is a draft. Treating it as finished work is the most common way a customer gets into trouble, and section 7 of the Terms of Service puts the responsibility for it squarely with you. In terms of conduct, that means you must:

• read and fact-check output before you publish it or send it to a client;
• verify any statistic, quotation, citation, price, date or legal statement it contains, because language models produce all of those confidently and sometimes wrongly;
• check that it does not reproduce someone else’s protected material;
• make whatever disclosure about AI assistance your regulator, your client contract, your platform’s rules or your audience expects.

Configuring automated publishing does not remove any of this. If you set the platform to publish on a schedule, you have accepted responsibility for what it publishes.

Platform integrity and security

You must not:

• attempt to access another customer’s account, data or client workspaces;
• probe, scan or test the vulnerability of the platform, or breach or circumvent any authentication, rate limiting or access control, except under a written testing agreement with us;
• upload or transmit malware, or use the platform to distribute it;
• exceed documented API rate limits, scrape the interface, or automate the platform in a way that places disproportionate load on it;
• reverse engineer, decompile or disassemble the platform, except to the extent that restriction is prohibited by law;
• use the platform, or data extracted from it, to build or improve a competing product;
• resell, sublicense or share access outside the seat and client account structure of your plan, unless your plan expressly includes white-label resale;
• remove, obscure or alter any proprietary notice, except through the white-label features your plan provides.

Reporting a vulnerability is welcome. If you find a security issue, tell us at [email protected] and give us a reasonable time to fix it before disclosing it. We will not pursue a claim against anyone who reports in good faith, acts proportionately, does not access or alter other customers’ data, and does not degrade the service.

Fair use of credits, trials and plan limits

Plan limits and the credit system exist because the actions behind them cost real money to run. You must not:

• open more than one trial for the same organisation or the same website, or use different email addresses to obtain repeat trials;
• open multiple accounts to work around a seat, project, keyword, prompt or client account limit;
• share one seat between several people;
• use automation to consume credits at a rate that has no plausible relationship to reviewing the results;
• resell credits, or resell platform output as a raw data feed.

Ordinary heavy use is not abuse. A customer who uses their whole allowance every month is exactly the customer we want. The rules above are about circumventing the meter, not about using it fully.

The rules of the services you connect

When the platform acts through a service you have connected, your use has to comply with that service’s terms as well as with ours. In particular:

• your use of data obtained through Google APIs is subject to Google’s API terms and to the Google API Services User Data Policy, and you must not extract that data from the platform in order to do something Google prohibits;
• publishing through the WordPress integration must comply with your host’s terms and with any plugin licences on the site;
• content generated with AI models routed through the platform is subject to the usage policies of the model providers, which prohibit categories of content that overlap heavily with section 3 of this policy;
• you must maintain your own accounts with connected services in good standing. We cannot restore access that a provider has withdrawn from you.

How we enforce this policy

We investigate reports and signals of misuse. Wherever it is safe and lawful, we work up this ladder rather than starting at the top:

1. We tell you. We describe the problem, cite the rule, and give you a reasonable period to fix it. Most matters end here, because most are misunderstandings.
2. We restrict. We may disable a specific feature, throttle a rate, or suspend a single connected property while the matter is resolved.
3. We suspend. Access is paused. Your data stays intact and you can still export it.
4. We terminate. The agreement ends under section 17 of the Terms of Service, and the data retention and export periods there apply.

We will start further up the ladder where waiting would cause harm: an active security attack, content of the kind described in the fourth bullet of section 3, a credible legal demand, or conduct that puts other customers’ data or the platform’s standing with a provider at risk. In those cases we act first and explain as soon as we can.

Suspension or termination for a breach of this policy does not entitle you to a refund of fees already paid, and does not release you from fees already due. The Refund and Cancellation Policy covers the exceptions.

If you think we have got it wrong, reply to the notice or email [email protected]. A person will look at it again.

Reporting misuse

If you believe an account is being used in breach of this policy, tell us at [email protected]. Include the URLs or the domain involved, what you observed, and when. We investigate every report we can act on and will confirm receipt, though we cannot always tell you the outcome, because what happens to another customer’s account is confidential to them.

If you believe content published using the platform infringes your copyright or trade mark, or defames you, send us enough detail to identify the material and your rights in it, at the same address. We will pass valid complaints to the customer responsible and act under this policy where the complaint is well founded. We are not the publisher of customer content, so a complaint about a published page is usually best directed at whoever operates the site.