Terms of Service

[PLACEHOLDER — to be completed before launch] Aethos AI is operated by [LEGAL ENTITY NAME], [REGISTERED ADDRESS], [COMPANY NUMBER, if applicable]. Until this block is completed, treat the operator as the individual reachable through our aethoshq.com/support form or at hello@aethoshq.com.

1. What the service does

Aethos measures how AI answer engines — currently ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity — respond to shopping questions relevant to your Shopify catalogue. We generate those questions, ask the engines, store the answers with the sources they cited as evidence, score your visibility and share-of-voice, suggest rewrites of your product content, and, when you approve them, write those rewrites back to your store. Available features and usage limits depend on your plan.

We also run public tools that need no account: a free brand check and a Shelf Check that reports on a store's readiness for AI shopping agents using publicly available data. Those reports are our own opinion applied to public data by a method we publish; they are not statements of fact about a business, and we are not affiliated with or endorsed by Shopify or by any store we report on.

2. Your account

You sign in with a one-time link sent to your email address. Anyone with access to that inbox can access your account, so keep it secure. You must be at least 18 and using Aethos for a business. You are responsible for everything done under your account.

3. Your store and your content

Your product content is yours. You grant us only the permission needed to provide the service: to read your catalogue, analyse it, and write back the specific changes you approve.

You remain responsible for what is published on your store. Our suggestions are generated by AI models and can be wrong, generic, or make claims your products do not support. Nothing is pushed to your store until you approve it. Review every suggestion before you accept it — you, not us, are accountable for the accuracy, legality and advertising compliance of your published copy.

4. Acceptable use

You agree not to:

• use Aethos to publish content that is unlawful, deceptive, infringing, or that makes claims you cannot substantiate;
• resell, sublicense or white-label the service, or scrape or bulk export it, without our written agreement;
• attempt to bypass plan limits, rate limits or authentication, or probe our systems without permission;
• use our public tools — the free brand check and the Shelf Check — in an automated or abusive way, or in a manner designed to burden a third party, including running them repeatedly against a competitor's store;
• present a Shelf Check report as an official Shopify assessment, as a statement of fact about another business, or as anything other than our own disclosed-method opinion over public data;
• upload or connect data you do not have the right to give us.

If a Shelf Check report covers a store you own and you want it removed, you do not need to invoke these terms — use the takedown route in our Privacy Policy and a person will answer you within 7 days.

5. Suspension and termination

We may suspend or terminate access if you breach these terms, if your use threatens the stability or security of the service, if it exposes us to legal risk, or for non-payment. Where it is reasonable and safe to do so we will warn you first and give you a chance to fix it; for serious abuse we may act immediately. You can stop using Aethos and cancel at any time — see our Refund & Cancellation Policy.

6. What we do not promise

We do not guarantee any outcome in AI search. We cannot, and we will not pretend otherwise. We do not promise that ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity or any other engine will mention, recommend or rank your products, that your visibility score will rise, or that your traffic or revenue will increase. Those engines are third-party systems we do not control; they change their models, their sources and their behaviour without notice, and the same question can produce different answers on different days.

What we do commit to is honest measurement: every score we show is backed by a stored answer you can inspect — with the sources it cited, when the engine returned any — and we will tell you when we do not know something rather than inventing a number. Anyone — including us — who promises you a guaranteed position in an AI answer is guessing.

7. Third-party services

Aethos depends on Shopify, on third-party AI providers, and on our payment and email providers. We are not responsible for their availability, their pricing changes, or their acts and omissions. If a provider changes its API or terms in a way that removes a feature, we will tell you.

8. Payment, and Paddle as merchant of record

Our order process is conducted by our online reseller Paddle.com, which is the merchant of record for all our orders. This means that when you buy a subscription, your purchase contract for that transaction is with Paddle, not with us. Paddle handles the payment, issues the invoice, and calculates, collects and remits any sales tax or VAT due. Paddle's buyer terms and privacy notice apply to that transaction in addition to these terms. Your contract for use of the Aethos service itself remains with us and is governed by this document.

Subscriptions renew automatically until cancelled. Prices are shown before you buy — the current plans and prices are on our pricing page, and that page, this document and the checkout all read the same figures from one place so they cannot disagree. If we change the price of your plan we will give you notice before it applies to a renewal. Refunds and cancellation are covered in our Refund & Cancellation Policy.

9. Availability and disclaimers

The service is provided "as is" and "as available". We work hard to keep it running and accurate, but we do not warrant that it will be uninterrupted, error-free, or that the analysis will be complete or correct. To the fullest extent permitted by law we disclaim all implied warranties, including merchantability and fitness for a particular purpose.

10. Limitation of liability

To the fullest extent permitted by law, we are not liable for lost profits, lost revenue, lost sales, loss of data, or any indirect, incidental, special or consequential damages. Our total liability for any claim relating to the service is limited to the amount you paid us in the twelve months before the event giving rise to the claim.

Nothing in these terms excludes liability for fraud, for death or personal injury caused by negligence, or for anything else that cannot lawfully be excluded. Some jurisdictions do not allow certain exclusions, in which case the exclusions above apply only so far as that jurisdiction permits.

11. Your data

How we handle personal data is set out in our Privacy Policy, which forms part of these terms.

12. Changes to these terms

We may update these terms. We will change the "Last updated" date at the top, and for material changes we will email account holders at least 14 days before they take effect. Continuing to use Aethos after that means you accept the new terms; if you do not, cancel and we will apply the refund policy.

13. Governing law

[PLACEHOLDER — to be completed before launch] These terms are governed by the laws of [GOVERNING LAW JURISDICTION], and the courts of [JURISDICTION] have exclusive jurisdiction, without affecting any mandatory consumer rights you have where you live.

14. Contact

Questions about these terms: hello@aethoshq.com, or our aethoshq.com/support form.