Acceptable-use policy.

Watch businesses, not people#

You may add URLs that belong to companies, products, services, brands, or industry publications. You may not add URLs that exist primarily to identify, locate, or profile a specific individual: personal social-media profiles, dating sites, individual public-figure pages outside their professional role, or political-opposition research targeting named individuals.

Edge cases (a competitor founder’s blog, a thought-leader’s newsletter) are usually fine because the focus is the business context. If you are unsure, ask legal@spotrivals.com.

Public pages only#

You may only ask SpotRivals to monitor URLs that are accessible without authentication: public pricing pages, marketing pages, blog posts, public job boards, public changelogs, public help centres.

You may not provide credentials, cookies, or session tokens to access pages behind a login or paywall, even when those credentials are yours, even when the access would otherwise be lawful. SpotRivals is not a credential-based scraper.

Honor robots.txt and rate limits#

Our scraper identifies itself as SpotRivalsBot and respects robots.txt directives, including site-wide disallows and our specific user-agent. We back off automatically when a site returns 429 or 503.

You may not ask us to bypass these protections, spoof our user agent, or rotate IP addresses to evade rate limiting. If a site blocks us, we will tell you and you can swap the URL for a friendlier one.

Do not republish AI summaries verbatim#

The AI analyses SpotRivals generates are for your internal decision-making. You may quote them in internal documents, board updates, and strategy meetings. You may not republish them verbatim as your own writing on a public website, in a blog post, in a press release, or as social-media content.

You may, of course, write your own analysis informed by what SpotRivals surfaced. That is the entire point of the product.

No abuse of the platform#

• No automated account creation. Trials are for evaluation by a human, not for circumventing plan limits.
• No scraping the SpotRivals marketing site, dashboard, or APIs beyond what your plan documents.
• No running another monitoring product through SpotRivals.
• No probing the service for vulnerabilities outside a coordinated disclosure (see the Security overview).
• No uploading malware, harmful payloads, or content that violates third-party intellectual property in the notes you attach to a competitor.

No illegal use#

You will not use SpotRivals in a way that violates applicable law, including data-protection law, anti-spam law, sanctions law, or laws governing competitive intelligence in regulated industries.

Enforcement#

When we believe a bright line has been crossed, we will:

1. Email the account owner with what we observed and what we are asking you to change. The vast majority of cases stop here.
2. Suspend the affected feature (e.g. remove a specific URL) if the situation requires it before we hear back.
3. Suspend the account if the violation is severe (illegal use, security threat) or repeats after notice.
4. Terminate and refund the unused portion of your plan if the violation cannot be cured.

To report a violation by another SpotRivals customer, email abuse@spotrivals.com. We treat reports confidentially.