Terms of service

Who these terms are for

Vercatus is a business service. By creating a workspace you confirm that you are acting for a company or other organisation, not as a consumer, and that you have the authority to bind it. "You" in these terms means that organisation. "We" means Vercatus, Budapest, Hungary (Oktelo Solutions).

Enterprise customers may have a signed agreement with us. Where it differs from these terms, the signed agreement prevails.

The service

Vercatus is an AI visibility growth service. On a plan, it asks the AI answer engines the questions your market asks on the topics you measure and records their answers; shows how often those answers name or cite you and your competitors (Answer Share); shows why, from what the engines remember, the public pages they read and the searches they run; proposes plays, each an exact change with a guide, a draft and an acceptance check; and, once a play ships, reads a verdict on whether it moved the answers it aimed at, against topics left alone. It also fetches sampled pages of websites you control, under the identities that search engines and AI answer engines use, and reports what those systems can reach and read.

Answer Share, AI demand, expected gains and verdicts are measurements and estimates, each shown with its range or grade. They are not a guarantee of ranking, traffic, citation or revenue, and a play may not have the effect expected on every site. The methodology page states what each measurement can and cannot prove; those limits are part of the service description.

Your account and workspace

1. The person who creates a workspace is its owner and may invite members with the roles the product offers. You are responsible for who you invite and for what they do in the workspace.
2. Keep passwords and API keys confidential. Actions taken with your credentials are yours until you tell us they were compromised, after which we help you revoke them.
3. Every decision, run, export and setting change is written to the workspace's audit log with who did it and from where. The log is part of the service and cannot be switched off.
4. A new account confirms its email address with the code or the link we send. Until it is confirmed, the first look described below does not start, no plan can be bought, invitations cannot be sent and no email goes to addresses other than the account's own.

Domains you may analyse

You may add only domains you own or are authorised by their owner to have analysed, and you prove that control with Search Console, a DNS record or a meta tag before any analysis runs. You warrant that authorisation for every domain in your workspace and you indemnify us against claims from a domain's owner that arise because it was not true. We analyse nothing that has not been verified, and we do not analyse a third party's site for you. What Vercatus reads of a domain before it is verified is what any visitor can read, in the ways listed under Our crawler below, and the public pages that answer engines cite in their answers are read for the brands and facts they state, as sources of the answers rather than as an analysis of their site.

Before a plan

A workspace without a plan runs no analysis. Once the owner's email address is confirmed, Vercatus takes a first look at the first domain the workspace adds, before that domain is verified: it reads robots.txt first, and requests nothing else if that disallows Vercatus; otherwise it requests the home page, llms.txt and the sitemaps, as plain HTTP and under the user-agent strings of Googlebot and the AI crawlers, in a few dozen requests. It is repeated when you ask, no more than once a day. Nothing is sent to a model, and only a short summary is kept, such as the home page's title and icon, how each crawler was answered, and how many pages the sitemaps list. The workspace sees that summary; the poll, the analysis, the plays and the verdicts need a plan and a verified domain. The first look is provided at no charge and as is, carries no service commitment, and may be changed or withdrawn at any time.

Plans, allowances and payment

1. What a plan is. The plans are Essentials, Starter, Growth, Portfolio and Enterprise. A plan is a fixed price, monthly or annual, for a fixed allowance: a number of sites, the topics the poll measures on each site, the AI answers it reads each month on each site, and seats. Every plan includes every answer engine Vercatus measures, the Why lenses, the Engine Briefs, the plays and the verdicts; no engine is sold separately. The allowances and the price of each plan are those stated on the pricing page when you subscribe. Nothing is metered and nothing is charged beyond the plan without your agreement. Enterprise is a contract, described below.
2. At the edge of the allowance. The poll measures as many topics as the plan includes; another topic takes the place of one you pause, or needs a larger plan. When another limit of the plan is reached, the work it counts waits for the next period, and the product says what is waiting and why. Adding a site beyond the plan's included sites is charged at the per-site price stated on the pricing page, prorated for the current period. Seats beyond the plan's are charged at the seat price stated there.
3. Renewal and payment. A plan is billed monthly or annually, as you choose at checkout, and is charged in advance to the payment method on file. A monthly plan renews each month and an annual plan each year, on the day you subscribed; an annual plan costs ten times the monthly price. On either, the allowances reset monthly on that day. Payment is taken by Stripe as merchant of record through its Link service: the checkout page, the receipt and the invoice come from Link, and your statement shows LINK.COM* before our name. You can change the card, download invoices and cancel from Manage billing in the workspace or from your Link account.
4. Taxes. Prices include VAT, GST and sales tax. As merchant of record, Stripe calculates the tax contained in the price at checkout according to your billing address and the tax details you enter there, shows it on the invoice, and remits it. Business customers enter their VAT or tax number at checkout so the invoice carries it; the price paid stays the same, with no VAT added.
5. Price changes. We may change a plan's price with at least thirty days' notice by email to the workspace owner. The new price applies from the first renewal after the notice period. If you do not accept it, cancel before that renewal.
6. Failed payments. If a charge fails, Stripe retries it over the following days and the Plan page shows that the payment failed. While Stripe retries, the plan stays in force: the poll, runs and every other part of the plan continue. If no retry succeeds, Stripe ends the subscription or marks it unpaid. Either way the plan's allowances stop at once: the poll stops, no run starts, and what was produced stays visible and exportable. An ended subscription then follows the ninety days described under term and cancellation below; an unpaid one stays so until it is paid, which restores the plan, or cancelled.
7. Refunds. Fees for a period that has started are not refunded, except where the law requires it or we have failed to provide the service for a material part of the period. One further exception: If you ask within 14 days of your first payment and no run has started, what you have paid is refunded in full. A run starts when the domain is verified, so a domain that cannot be verified is refunded. The owner claims it by cancelling from the Plan page.
8. Trials. Paid plans have no trial period and there is no free analysis. Before a plan, a workspace has only the first look described above.
9. Enterprise. Enterprise arrangements are annual contracts, quoted and invoiced under their own agreement; the allowances stated there replace the plan allowances.

Acceptable use

You may not use Vercatus to attack, overload, scrape or probe a site you are not authorised to analyse; to circumvent a site's access controls or robots directives; to build a competing dataset from other sites' content; to add topics or questions about a private individual rather than a market, a brand or a product; to resell the service or the API without our written agreement; or in a way that breaks the law. You may not attempt to access another workspace's data or to interfere with the service. We may suspend a workspace immediately if it is used in these ways and will tell you why.

Our crawler

Our crawler names itself as Vercatus and signs its page and file requests over plain HTTP with a published key: a run's, the identity probes' and the access watch's. A page it renders in a headless browser, the home-page read for a meta-tag proof, the icon fetch, the checks of a commerce feed and of a crawler-traffic connection, and the logo fetch for a report name Vercatus in the user agent and are not signed. It honours robots.txt when it reads pages for a run, the first look and the setup wizard's check, except for the icon fetch, and keeps its page requests to a rate limit. Before a domain is verified it reads what any visitor can read and nothing behind a login: the first look described above; the one request the setup wizard makes to the home page of a domain you type, after reading its robots.txt; the home page, when it looks for your meta-tag proof; the home page and icon of a host the workspace shows, such as a competitor or a cited domain, for the icon beside its name; and the public pages answer engines cite, which it fetches under its own name. It analyses only verified domains. Because part of the measurement is to request your pages under the user-agent strings that named search and AI crawlers publish, your site's logs will show those strings from our network during a run, as they will the user agent of any agent task you set up, which runs under the identity you choose; the crawler page explains how to tell our requests from the real crawlers. If a site blocks our identity, Vercatus records the refusal; we do not evade it.

Your content and the reports

1. Your website's content, and the topics, questions and competitors you add, stay yours. You grant us the right to fetch, store and process them, to send your pages' text to the model providers listed in the privacy policy, and to ask the answer engines listed there your topics' questions word for word, including the searches taken from your Search Console when you connect it, to produce your measurement and analysis, and for nothing else except the shared answers and aggregate figures described below.
2. The Answer Share figures, plays and their drafts, verdicts, reports, briefs and exports produced for your workspace are yours to use, share and forward. You may quote them and attribute them to Vercatus.
3. We do not use your content or your results to train models, and we do not show your name, your domains, your topics, your questions or your figures to anyone outside your workspace without your written agreement.
4. Answers to public questions on your topics may be reused for another workspace that asks an identical question within six hours, and you may receive answers first asked for another; nothing in a shared answer says who asked. Private questions, among them every question taken from your Search Console, are never shared, and a workspace admin can turn sharing off.
5. The public pages answer engines cite are read once for all customers and kept by us, with nothing about which workspace's answers cited them.
6. We may use aggregate figures that do not identify a customer, a site, a topic or a question to improve the product and describe it. In particular, the final verdicts of plays, natural experiments on public pages and the calibration of AI demand are pooled across customers to set expected gains and demand estimates for everyone, and a pool is used or published only where at least three sites contribute to it, as the privacy policy describes.
7. The knowledge base, the software and the methodology are ours. Nothing in these terms transfers them.

Confidentiality and data

Each party keeps the other's non-public information confidential and uses it only for the purposes of this agreement. Personal data is handled as described in the privacy policy; where we process personal data on your behalf, the data processing agreement applies and forms part of these terms. Our security measures and retention periods are stated on the security page, which is kept current; a measure described there as planned is not part of the service until it ships.

Availability, support and changes

1. We aim to keep the workspace available continuously and to run the poll and scheduled analyses on time, but we do not guarantee either. An answer engine that is unavailable, or refuses a question, leaves a gap in the poll. Planned maintenance is announced in the workspace where we can.
2. Support is by email at hello@vercatus.com from an address on your workspace, on business days in Central European time. Enterprise agreements may state response times; plans do not.
3. We improve the product continuously. A change that removes a capability a plan includes is announced to the workspace owner at least thirty days ahead.
4. The API is provided for your own workspace's use, on the plans that include it, within the plan's allowances. Its documented shape may change with notice in the changelog; undocumented behaviour may change without it.

Warranties and liability

1. We warrant that the service is provided with reasonable skill and care and substantially as described on this site. We give no other warranty, and in particular none that a measurement or an answer engine's answer is complete or accurate, that a play will have a particular effect or win, or that any third-party system will cite, rank or read your site.
2. To the extent the law allows, our total liability under this agreement in any twelve-month period is limited to the fees you paid us in that period, and neither party is liable to the other for loss of profit, revenue, data or goodwill, or for indirect or consequential loss.
3. Nothing limits liability for death or personal injury caused by negligence, for fraud, or for anything that cannot be limited by law.
4. You indemnify us against third-party claims arising from a domain you added without authorisation or from your breach of the acceptable-use clause.

Term, cancellation and termination

1. A monthly plan runs month to month and an annual plan year to year until cancelled. Cancel at any time from the billing portal; the plan stays active to the end of the paid period (the month, or the year for an annual plan) and does not renew.
2. A plan can be paused for up to three months from the workspace: nothing is charged while it is paused, the poll stops and no run starts, what was produced stays visible, and it resumes on the date chosen or earlier at your request. A pause is not a cancellation; the retention periods of a cancelled workspace do not begin.
3. After cancellation, or after a subscription ends because it was not paid, nothing more is measured: the poll stops and no run starts, and Answer Share, the plays, the verdicts, the reports and the history stay visible for ninety days, and the workspace's data stays exportable: its sites, runs, findings, verified fixes, tracked questions, the answers behind Answer Share, goals, audit log and usage. You can subscribe again in that time and continue where you were.
4. You can ask us to delete the workspace at any time; we delete it within thirty days of the request, as the retention statement says, and confirm by email. Ninety days after a cancelled subscription's last paid day the workspace is closed, which makes it read-only, and it is deleted within thirty days of closing without being asked.
5. Either party may end the agreement immediately if the other materially breaches it and does not put it right within fourteen days of being told. We may also end it immediately for a breach of the acceptable-use clause.
6. Clauses that by their nature outlast the agreement, including confidentiality, the content clauses, liability and governing law, survive it.

Governing law and disputes

This agreement is governed by the law of Hungary, excluding its conflict-of-law rules and the UN Convention on Contracts for the International Sale of Goods. Disputes are brought before the courts of Budapest, Hungary. Because the service is offered to businesses only, consumer-protection rules do not apply to it. Before starting proceedings, each party agrees to write to the other and to try for thirty days to settle the matter.

Changes to these terms

We may update these terms. The version number and date at the top change, and the previous version stays available on request. A change that affects your rights or obligations is emailed to workspace owners at least thirty days before it takes effect; if you do not accept it, cancel before then. Continuing to use the service after that date is acceptance.

Contact

Vercatus, Budapest, Hungary. hello@vercatus.com for the agreement, billing and support; abuse@vercatus.com for security reports and crawler questions.