Terms of Service

1. What this service does

X-Protocols publishes structured business data on behalf of the business that submits it, and serves that data to software agents through a machine-readable interface. It is a publishing and retrieval system. It does not sell, broker or fulfil anything, and it does not act on your behalf in any transaction.

2. You are the publisher, and you are accountable for what you publish

Everything you submit is published as your assertion, cryptographically signed and attributed to your verified domain. You confirm that:

• you are authorised to publish on behalf of the business named in your account;
• the facts you publish are accurate at the time you publish them, and you will correct or withdraw them when they stop being accurate;
• you will not publish anything unlawful, misleading, or belonging to someone else.

Because records carry your signature, an inaccurate record is your statement, not ours. We do not review records for accuracy and we make no representation about them.

3. How published records may be reused

This section is the licence your published records are served under, and it is the document license points at in the machine-readable description of your dataset. It governs the records you publish — not your account, not this website, and not our own text, design or software.

Anyone may read, cache, quote, cite and redistribute your published records, including search engines, AI assistants and their crawlers, and including commercially. That is the purpose of publishing here, and you grant X-Protocols the right to serve them on those terms for as long as you publish them. In exchange, three conditions travel with the data:

• Attribution to the business. Your business is named as the creator of its own records. A reuser must not present them as their own or as anyone else's.
• No misrepresentation. A record may not be altered and then still presented as what you published, and the provenance and confirmation time served with it may not be stripped and replaced with a different claim about where it came from.
• Withdrawal is public and must be honoured. Every record names the revocation feed it can be withdrawn through. A reuser who caches a record is expected to check that feed and stop presenting what you have taken back.

You can stop it. Withdraw a record, or close the account, and we stop serving it and publish the withdrawal. What we cannot do is reach into a copy a third party already made — no licence can, which is why this is worth understanding before you publish. See section 2.

We deliberately do not place your records under an irrevocable open licence such as CC-BY. That choice belongs to you and not to us, and it cannot be undone once the data has been crawled under it.

4. Verification is required, and it can be withdrawn

Data is only published once your authority to publish for the business has been proven. There is more than one way to prove it: control of the domain, shown by publishing a DNS TXT record, is one; evidence a person at X-Protocols reviewed — an official register entry, a document identifying the owner, a code delivered to the published address — is another, and reaches the same verified state. A business with no domain of its own is not excluded. Whichever proof was accepted is stated on the public page, and a page never claims a domain was verified when it was not. Proofs are re-checked periodically. If a proof lapses and nothing else supports publication, publication stops. Records may also be withdrawn through the revocation feed, which is public — a consumer who cached a record can learn it was withdrawn.

5. What we do not promise

We do not promise, and no statement anywhere on this site should be read as promising, that any AI system, search engine, assistant or crawler will read, use, cite, rank or recommend your data. No one can control what third-party systems do. What we provide is publication in a standard, verifiable, machine-readable form, and an honest refusal — not_covered — when a question is not answerable from what you published.

The service is provided as-is, without warranty of availability, fitness for a particular purpose, or uninterrupted operation.

6. Acceptable use

Do not use the service to publish data about a business you do not represent, to attempt to access another publisher's data, to probe or attack the infrastructure, or to exceed the request limits of your plan by technical means. We may suspend an account that does, and we will say why.

7. Availability, plans and payment

Plan limits are shown on the pricing page and enforced in software. A plan buys capability and limits — storage, request volume, tooling, support. It never buys verification, authority, a ranking, or a place in any assistant's answer. Those are decided by evidence you supply and by systems we do not control, and no amount of money moves them.

Every paid plan starts with a free trial of 1 month, counted from the day you register the account — not from the day you choose a plan, not from the day you reach checkout, and not from any date a payment provider assigns. A paid plan requires a payment method, and nothing is charged for 1 month from the day the account is registered. The first payment falls due 1 month after registration, on the plan that was chosen, at the price shown against it. Cancelling at any point before that date means no payment is ever taken.

We email 14 and 3 days before that first payment, so it never arrives unannounced. You can cancel from your own billing settings at any time before the first payment, and cancelling during the trial means no payment is ever taken. Card details are handled by the payment provider and never reach our servers — see the Privacy Policy for what each side holds.

A subscription is never started for you. You choose the plan, you are shown the price and the renewal date before you confirm, and a paid plan renews at the stated price and cadence until you cancel. Cancelling stops all future renewals.

Where payment is enabled, payments are processed by a third-party payment provider acting as merchant of record; it issues your invoice and its own terms govern the payment itself.

The trial is never charged. Cancel before it ends and no payment is taken at all. Once a paid period has begun, that payment is final for the period it covers, and cancelling stops the next renewal rather than reversing the last charge — the full rule, including the cases we always return, is the Refund Policy. Where a mandatory consumer right applies to you and cannot be waived by agreement, that right applies and nothing here overrides it.

If a payment fails, your plan keeps working for 21 days. We retry the payment and we email you, at the start of that period and again as it runs out. If no payment succeeds by the end of it, the account moves to the free tier's limits until one does — nothing is deleted, nothing you published is taken down, and a successful payment puts the plan back exactly as it was. No account is ever deleted, and no page is ever unpublished, because of a billing state.

8. Changing your plan

You can move between plans whenever you like, and which direction you are going decides when it takes effect and what it costs.

Moving to a larger plan takes effect immediately. You are charged the difference between the two plans for the days remaining in the period you have already paid for — not a full month, and not the two plans added together. The exact amount is shown on the screen before you confirm it, and it is the amount that is charged.

Moving to a smaller plan takes effect at the end of the period you have already paid for. You keep the plan you paid for until that period runs out, with everything it includes, and the smaller plan and its lower price begin at the next renewal. Nothing is charged on the day you ask, and nothing is refunded — you are not losing the money, you are using the time you bought. You can cancel a change you have scheduled at any point before it happens, and asking for a different plan replaces the scheduled one rather than adding to it.

During a free trial both directions take effect immediately and neither is charged, because nothing has been paid yet and there is no paid period to protect. The trial still ends on its original date, and the plan you are on when it ends is the plan that is charged — one amount, for one plan, never a total of the plans you passed through.

9. Ending the relationship

You can stop publishing at any time by removing your records or your DNS verification record; publication stops on the next re-check either way. Ask us at support@x-protocols.com to delete an account and its data and we will do so. Note that anything already published was public, and public data may have been cached or copied by third parties we do not control — deletion here cannot reach those copies.

10. Liability

To the extent permitted by law, our liability for any claim arising from the service is limited to the amount you have paid us for it in the twelve months before the claim. Where you have paid us nothing, that limit is nothing. We are not liable for decisions taken by third-party AI systems based on data you published.

11. Accessibility

We want this service to be usable by as many people as reasonably possible, including people who use a screen reader, navigate by keyboard, need larger text, or rely on reduced-motion, high-contrast or other assistive settings.

Accessibility is something we consider as we build, not a pass we do at the end. In practice that means: every form control has a label bound to it, every page can be worked through with a keyboard alone, focus is always visible, headings describe the structure of the page rather than its styling, errors are announced rather than only coloured, and the interface honours your system's reduced-motion setting.

We are not claiming a certification. We have not been independently audited and we do not claim conformance to a particular WCAG level. Saying otherwise would be easy and would be worth nothing to you.

If you hit something you cannot use, please tell us — a description of what you were trying to do and what got in the way is enough, and you do not need to know the technical name for it. We will look into it, tell you what we find, and fix what we reasonably can. Contact details are in section 13.

12. Changes

We will update these terms as the service changes, and the "last updated" date above will change with them. Material changes will be sent to the email address on your account.

13. Contact

support@x-protocols.com