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Compliance

What we will not sell, and why

Every item on this page is a service somebody in this industry actively offers, priced and productized. Some of it the FTC banned in 2024. The rest we refuse on our own.

The list

3 of the 5 are matters of FTC rule or guidance. The other 2 are our own line, and the reasoning for each is under it.

Posting to Reddit, forums or communities on a client's behalf without disclosing the connection. This is sold openly in this industry as a productized service, priced per post, described as building brand profile to influence AI. Under FTC endorsement guidance a material connection has to be disclosed, and beyond the rules it is simply astroturfing. Reddit is roughly 37 to 44 percent of the social content AI engines cite, which is exactly why it is tempting and exactly why we will not. The version we do sell is Community Mentions: we find the threads and draft the answer, you post it under your own name.

Engines return different answers to identical prompts. Nobody controls that, including the vendors who sell a guarantee against it, and a promise about a non-deterministic system is a story rather than a guarantee. We guarantee the work, the delivery window and the measurement, because those are the parts that are ours to control.

Where we place on third-party pages we favor publishers with editorial standards who disclose sponsored or paid placement properly. A placement that only works because the reader cannot tell it was paid for is worth less to you than it looks, because it is one policy change away from being worth nothing.

We both measure and fulfill, which is a conflict and we are not going to pretend otherwise. What we do about it: the method is published, the prompt basket is fixed and shared so a customer's scan is comparable to anybody else's, the confidence band is reported on every number, and a re-scan that shows no detectable change is reported as no detectable change. If measurement ever stops being able to say our own work did not land, it has stopped being measurement.

What we do guarantee

Narrow on purpose. A guarantee is only worth something if it covers things we control.

Guaranteed

  • Delivery inside the window stated on the service, which is published in working days rather than described as fast.
  • A scan before and a scan after, on the same prompt basket, with the confidence band on both.
  • A report that says what the band says, including when what it says is that nothing detectable changed.

What a re-scan can say

The bands separateA measured change
The bands overlapNo detectable change
The bands separate downwardReported the same way

A service that could not fail would mean nothing when it succeeded. The measurement has to be able to come back negative, and when it does you will be told, because a vendor whose reports only ever go up is not reporting.

Your results, and who owns them

We publish anonymized measurements from work we do, with your domain and brand removed, unless you opt out. We never publish anything that identifies you without asking first. The full clause is in the terms, and you can opt out at checkout or afterwards, including retroactively.

The services this applies to

Every service carries its own limit, stated on the card, including the ones where the honest answer is that a placement is a rented position rather than a permanent one.