BrandKnown — Terms of Service
Last updated: 1 September 2026 Effective date: 1 September 2026
These Terms of Service ("Terms") are a binding agreement between you and BrandKnown, a sole proprietorship operated from Colorado, United States, with a mailing address at P.O. Box 537, Denver, CO 80132 ("BrandKnown", "we", "us", "our"). They govern your access to and use of the BrandKnown website at brandknown.help, the scanning and reporting service, the free tools, the API if we make one available, and any files or reports the service generates (together, the "Service").
By creating an account, running a scan, or otherwise using the Service, you agree to these Terms. If you do not agree, do not use the Service. If you are using the Service on behalf of a company or other organisation, you represent that you have authority to bind that organisation, and "you" means that organisation.
Our Privacy Policy is incorporated into these Terms by reference.
1. What the Service does
BrandKnown fetches a small number of publicly accessible URLs from a website you submit
— typically the homepage, /robots.txt, /llms.txt, and an About page it can locate —
parses what it finds, and returns an "entity card": a health score with each deduction
itemised, a list of findings, and copy-and-paste artifacts such as Organization JSON-LD,
a robots.txt merge snippet, a draft llms.txt, an About fact block, and (on eligible
plans) a downloadable Apply Pack.
Depending on your plan, the Service may additionally query one or more third-party AI assistants to report whether and how they describe your brand, compare your site against a competitor's, and fetch your homepage using a third-party crawler's user-agent to observe how your server responds.
What the Service does not do. It does not modify, install anything on, or gain access to your website. It is not a full-site crawl. It does not perform keyword ranking, backlink analysis, or content scoring.
2. Eligibility and accounts
2.1 You must be at least 16 years old, or the age of digital consent in your jurisdiction if higher, to use the Service. The Service is not directed to children.
2.2 Some functionality is available without an account. Saved brands, scan history, paid plans, and most metered features require you to register with an email address and password, or through a supported single sign-on provider.
2.3 You are responsible for the accuracy of your account information, for keeping your credentials confidential, and for all activity under your account. Notify us at security@brandknown.help promptly if you believe your account has been compromised.
2.4 One account is for one person or one organisation. Do not share credentials in order to exceed plan limits, and do not create multiple free accounts to circumvent quotas.
3. Your right to scan a site — this is the important one
3.1 You must be authorised. By submitting a URL, you represent and warrant that you either (a) own or operate the site, (b) are authorised by its owner or operator to submit it, or (c) the site is publicly accessible and your submission of it is lawful in your jurisdiction and does not breach that site's terms of use or any agreement you have with its operator.
3.2 Competitor scanning. Certain plans allow you to scan a site you do not control in order to compare it against your own. You are solely responsible for determining that doing so is lawful and permitted where you are. We do not make that determination for you, and Section 3.1 applies in full to every URL you submit.
3.3 What our crawler does, stated plainly. Our fetcher identifies itself as
BrandAnchorBot/0.1 with a contact URL in its user-agent string. It reads your
robots.txt in order to analyse it, but it does not obey robots.txt for its own
requests. Our reasoning is that a scan is a one-off, user-initiated retrieval of roughly
five public URLs — closer to a person opening the site in a browser than to a background
indexing crawler — and it is rate limited, byte limited, timeout limited, and identified.
If you want it never to reach a server you control, block the user-agent at your CDN or
WAF; a robots.txt rule alone will not stop it. One feature deliberately sends a
third-party crawler's user-agent (GPTBot) against a site you submit, because its entire
purpose is to observe how a server treats that specific agent.
3.4 Rate and volume limits. We apply per-IP rate limits, a global concurrency cap, a per-user rolling daily cap, and per-plan monthly quotas. You must not attempt to evade them — by rotating IP addresses or accounts, by scripting the interface, or otherwise.
3.5 No stress testing. The Service is not a load-testing tool. Submitting a URL repeatedly in order to generate traffic against a server, whether yours or anyone else's, is prohibited.
4. Acceptable use
You agree not to, and not to permit anyone else to:
- use the Service to access any host that is not publicly routable, or to attempt to reach internal, private, loopback, or link-local addresses through it (we actively block this — attempting to defeat those protections is a material breach);
- probe, scan, or test the vulnerability of the Service or any related system, or breach or circumvent any security, authentication, quota, or rate-limiting measure, except under a written authorisation from us (see Section 4A);
- reverse engineer, decompile, or attempt to derive the source code, models, prompts, or scoring logic of the Service, except to the extent this restriction is unenforceable under applicable law;
- scrape, crawl, or bulk-extract the Service itself, or use it via any automated means other than an interface we document and provide;
- resell, sublicense, white-label, or provide the Service as a service to third parties without a written agreement with us;
- use the Service to build or train a competing product, or to create a dataset for training machine learning models;
- submit URLs or content that are unlawful, that infringe another party's rights, or that contain malware;
- misrepresent output of the Service as an endorsement, certification, or guarantee by us or by any AI provider named in a report;
- use the Service in any way that violates applicable law, including export control and sanctions law, or that harms, harasses, or defrauds any person.
4A. Security research
We welcome good-faith security research. Report suspected vulnerabilities to security@brandknown.help before disclosing them publicly. We will not pursue claims under these Terms against researchers who act in good faith, avoid privacy violations and service degradation, do not access or exfiltrate data belonging to other users, and give us a reasonable opportunity to remediate.
5. Plans, billing, and cancellation
5.1 Plans. We offer a free tier and paid subscription plans. The features, quotas, and prices in effect are those shown on the pricing page at the time you subscribe. Plan limits are enforced as monthly counters and per-plan feature flags; exceeding a limit shows an upgrade prompt rather than generating an overage invoice.
5.2 Payment processing. Payments are processed by Stripe, Inc. We do not receive or store your full card number. Your use of Stripe's checkout and billing portal is also subject to Stripe's own terms and privacy policy.
5.3 Recurring billing and authorisation. Paid plans renew automatically at the interval you select (monthly or annual) until cancelled. You authorise us and our payment processor to charge your payment method for each renewal at the then-current price, plus applicable taxes.
5.4 Price changes. We may change prices. For an existing subscription, we will give you at least 30 days' notice by email before the change takes effect at your next renewal. Continuing after that date is acceptance; if you do not accept, cancel before renewal.
5.5 Cancellation. You may cancel at any time from the billing portal. Cancellation takes effect at the end of the current billing period. You retain paid features until then, after which the account reverts to the free tier and paid-tier data such as extended scan history may become inaccessible or be deleted in accordance with the Privacy Policy.
5.6 Refunds. Except where a refund is required by law, fees are non-refundable and we do not provide credits for partial periods, unused quota, or periods during which you did not use the Service. We may issue discretionary refunds; doing so once does not obligate us to do so again.
5.7 Statutory withdrawal rights. If you are a consumer in the EU or UK, you have a statutory right to withdraw from a distance contract within 14 days. By starting to use a paid feature during that period you request immediate performance and acknowledge that your withdrawal right is extinguished once the service has been fully performed, and that otherwise any refund will be reduced proportionately to the use already made.
5.8 Taxes. Prices are exclusive of VAT, GST, sales tax, and similar charges unless stated otherwise. You are responsible for those, other than taxes on our net income.
5.9 Non-payment. If a charge fails, we may retry it, suspend paid features, or downgrade the account after reasonable notice.
6. Free tier and beta features
The free tier and any feature marked beta, preview, or experimental are provided as-is, without any service level commitment, and may be modified, limited, or discontinued at any time without notice. Anonymous scan results are held in your browser only and are not recoverable by us if you clear your browser storage.
7. Intellectual property
7.1 Ours. The Service, including its software, scoring methodology, prompts, designs, and the BrandKnown name and marks, is owned by us and our licensors and is protected by intellectual property law. Subject to these Terms, we grant you a limited, non-exclusive, non-transferable, revocable licence to access and use the Service for your internal business purposes or personal use.
7.2 Yours. You retain all rights in the URLs, content, and site data you submit ("Your Content"). You grant us a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free licence to host, process, transmit, display, and create derived analyses of Your Content solely to operate, secure, support, and improve the Service and to provide it to you. This licence ends when the relevant content is deleted, except for backups pending expiry and any aggregated or de-identified data described in Section 7.4.
7.3 Generated artifacts. Files the Service generates for you from a scan — JSON-LD,
llms.txt, robots.txt snippets, About copy, Apply Pack contents — are yours to use,
modify, publish, and host without attribution to us. We make no claim over them and no
warranty that they are correct, complete, or suitable for your site. Because these
artifacts are generated from templates and, on some plans, from language models, other
users may receive substantially similar output; we do not grant exclusivity in them.
7.4 Aggregated data. We may compile aggregated and de-identified statistics from use of the Service (for example, the share of scanned sites that block a given AI crawler) and use and publish them. Such data will not identify you, your organisation, or any specific site.
7.5 Feedback. If you send us suggestions, we may use them without restriction or compensation.
7.6 Third-party materials. Reports may reference or reproduce material from the site you scanned and may include output from third-party AI providers. We do not own that material and grant no rights in it.
8. AI output, scores, and accuracy — what we do not promise
8.1 The score is a checklist, not a grade. It starts at 100 and subtracts for specific, disclosed findings. A score of 100 means we found nothing to flag. It does not mean an AI assistant will mention or recommend you, and it is not a prediction of search rankings, traffic, revenue, or visibility.
8.2 llms.txt is a hint file. We treat /llms.txt as a convenience file in the
llmstxt.org style, not as a ranking signal. Nothing in the Service, and no plan you
purchase, causes any AI assistant or search engine to rank, cite, or recommend you.
8.3 AI output is probabilistic. Where the Service reports what an AI assistant says about your brand, that is a snapshot of one response at one moment. The same question may produce different answers on a different day, in a different region, or from a different model version. Assistants can be confidently wrong, can omit real organisations, and can invent details. Runs that do not search the live web answer from training data, and any URLs reported in that mode should be read as the shape of a category's sources rather than a verified citation log.
8.4 Detection is heuristic. Logos, About pages, categories, and entity names are identified by heuristics over server-rendered HTML. Content that is rendered by JavaScript after load, or placed in unusual locations, may be missed. A missed item is a finding about machine readability, not necessarily an error about your site.
8.5 Review before you publish. Artifacts the Service generates are drafts. You are responsible for reviewing them for accuracy, for legal and regulatory compliance, and for fit with your site before you publish them or hand them to an AI agent to apply. Do not publish a generated description of your organisation that you have not verified.
8.6 Not professional advice. The Service does not provide legal, financial, investment, tax, or regulatory advice.
9. Third-party services
The Service depends on third parties including our hosting and database providers, our payment processor, and one or more AI model providers. Their availability, changes to their APIs, their rate limits, and their content policies can affect the Service. We are not responsible for third-party services, and their inclusion is not an endorsement. If a provider becomes unavailable, features that depend on it may degrade — for example, a draft may fall back to a deterministic template, or a multi-assistant check may return fewer assistants.
10. Availability, changes, and support
10.1 We aim to keep the Service available but do not commit to any uptime percentage unless a separate written agreement says otherwise. Maintenance, outages, and third-party failures happen.
10.2 We may add, modify, or discontinue features. If we make a change that materially reduces a core feature of a paid plan, we will give you reasonable notice and, at your request, a pro-rata refund of prepaid fees for the remainder of the term.
10.3 Support is provided by email at support@brandknown.help on a commercially reasonable basis.
11. Suspension and termination
11.1 We may suspend or terminate your access, with notice where practicable and immediately where necessary, if you materially breach these Terms, if your use threatens the security, integrity, or availability of the Service or a third party's systems, if we are required to by law, or if your account is inactive on a free tier for more than 24 months.
11.2 You may stop using the Service at any time and may delete your account from account settings or by writing to privacy@brandknown.help.
11.3 On termination, your licence to use the Service ends and your data is handled as described in the Privacy Policy. Sections 3.1, 7, 8, 12, 13, 14, 15, and 16 survive.
12. Disclaimer of warranties
TO THE MAXIMUM EXTENT PERMITTED BY LAW, THE SERVICE AND ALL OUTPUT ARE PROVIDED "AS IS" AND "AS AVAILABLE", WITHOUT WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, WHETHER EXPRESS, IMPLIED, OR STATUTORY, INCLUDING IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE, TITLE, NON-INFRINGEMENT, ACCURACY, AND ANY WARRANTY ARISING FROM COURSE OF DEALING OR USAGE OF TRADE. WE DO NOT WARRANT THAT THE SERVICE WILL BE UNINTERRUPTED, SECURE, OR ERROR-FREE, THAT ANY SCAN WILL SUCCEED AGAINST A GIVEN SITE, OR THAT ANY OUTPUT WILL BE ACCURATE, COMPLETE, OR PRODUCE ANY PARTICULAR RESULT.
Some jurisdictions do not allow the exclusion of implied warranties, so parts of this section may not apply to you. Nothing here limits consumer rights that cannot be waived under the law of your country of residence.
13. Limitation of liability
13.1 TO THE MAXIMUM EXTENT PERMITTED BY LAW, NEITHER PARTY IS LIABLE FOR INDIRECT, INCIDENTAL, SPECIAL, CONSEQUENTIAL, OR EXEMPLARY DAMAGES, OR FOR LOSS OF PROFITS, REVENUE, DATA, GOODWILL, SEARCH RANKINGS, AI VISIBILITY, OR BUSINESS OPPORTUNITY, EVEN IF ADVISED OF THE POSSIBILITY.
13.2 OUR TOTAL AGGREGATE LIABILITY ARISING OUT OF OR RELATING TO THESE TERMS OR THE SERVICE WILL NOT EXCEED THE GREATER OF (A) THE AMOUNTS YOU PAID US IN THE 12 MONTHS BEFORE THE EVENT GIVING RISE TO THE CLAIM, OR (B) USD 100.
13.3 The limitations in 13.1 and 13.2 do not apply to either party's liability for death or personal injury caused by negligence, fraud or fraudulent misrepresentation, your breach of Sections 3 or 4, your indemnity obligations, or any liability that cannot be limited by law.
13.4 These limitations apply regardless of the theory of liability and even if a limited remedy fails of its essential purpose.
14. Indemnity
You will defend, indemnify, and hold harmless BrandKnown and its officers, employees, and agents from any third-party claim, and any resulting losses, liabilities, damages, and reasonable legal fees, arising out of (a) your breach of these Terms, in particular your representations in Section 3 about your right to submit a URL; (b) Your Content; (c) your publication or use of any artifact generated by the Service; or (d) your violation of law or of a third party's rights. This section does not apply to the extent a claim arises from our own breach or wilful misconduct, and it does not apply to consumers where prohibited by law.
15. Governing law and disputes
15.1 These Terms are governed by the laws of the State of Colorado, United States, without regard to conflict-of-laws rules, and the parties submit to the exclusive jurisdiction of the state and federal courts located in Denver County, Colorado.
15.2 If you are a consumer resident in the EU, UK, or another jurisdiction with mandatory consumer protections, nothing in 15.1 deprives you of the protection of the mandatory law of your country of residence or of the right to bring proceedings in your local courts.
15.3 Informal resolution first. Before filing any claim, contact us at support@brandknown.help with a description of the dispute. The parties will attempt in good faith to resolve it for 30 days.
15.4 [OPTIONAL — US-focused deployments only: arbitration and class-action-waiver clause to be inserted here on counsel's advice. Do not publish this bracket as-is.]
15.5 Any claim must be brought within one year after it arises, except where a longer period is required by law.
16. General
16.1 Changes to these Terms. We may update these Terms. We will post the revised version with a new "Last updated" date, and for material changes we will give at least 30 days' notice by email or in-product notice before they take effect. Continuing to use the Service after the effective date constitutes acceptance; if you do not accept, stop using the Service and cancel any subscription.
16.2 Entire agreement. These Terms and the Privacy Policy are the entire agreement between the parties on this subject and supersede prior discussions.
16.3 Severability. If a provision is unenforceable, it is modified to the minimum extent necessary and the rest remains in force.
16.4 No waiver. Failure to enforce a provision is not a waiver of it.
16.5 Assignment. You may not assign these Terms without our written consent. We may assign them to an affiliate or in connection with a merger, acquisition, or sale of assets.
16.6 Force majeure. Neither party is liable for delay or failure caused by events beyond its reasonable control.
16.7 No third-party beneficiaries, except that our affiliates and suppliers may enforce Sections 12 and 13.
16.8 Notices. We may give notice by email to your account address or by posting in the Service. Send notices to us at support@brandknown.help and P.O. Box 537, Denver, CO 80132.
16.9 Relationship. The parties are independent contractors. Nothing creates a partnership, agency, or employment relationship.
17. Contact
BrandKnown P.O. Box 537, Denver, CO 80132 General: support@brandknown.help · Legal: support@brandknown.help · Security: security@brandknown.help · Privacy: privacy@brandknown.help