Business Terms of Service

_Last updated: 3 August 2026_

These Business Terms of Service ("Business Terms") govern every use of TrustRating in a business capacity: claiming and managing a company profile, replying to reviews, inviting customers, using the business panel at business.trustrating.ai, team seats, and — together with the specialised documents they reference — subscriptions, widgets, the API and the affiliate program. They supplement the general Terms of Service; where the two conflict on business matters, these Business Terms prevail. By claiming a company, creating a business account or accepting a team invitation, you accept these Business Terms on behalf of the company you represent and warrant that you are authorised to do so.

1. The deal, in plain words

TrustRating gives every business — claimed or not, paying or not — a fair, evidence-based public reputation. What you can buy from us are tools: invitations, widgets, analytics, seats, integrations. What you can never buy is the score. No subscription tier, spend level or relationship with us changes a TrustScore, removes a genuine review, or alters how moderation treats your company. This commitment is contractual (see also the Content Integrity, Scoring & IP Policy) and it is the reason your good score is worth something.

2. Company profiles — claimed and unclaimed

TrustRating maintains profiles of companies based on public information and user contributions, and consumers may review a company whether or not it has claimed its profile. Publishing truthful information and genuine reviews about businesses is lawful (our legal basis is described in the Privacy Policy) and a company cannot demand deletion of its profile or its genuine reviews merely because it dislikes them. This is the same rule that protects you: your competitor cannot delete their bad reviews either, and the level playing field is the product. What a company can always do, free of charge: claim the profile, correct factual company details, reply publicly to every review, report rule-breaking reviews with evidence, and request a re-scan of its AI assessment. Claiming follows the Company Claims & Domain Verification Policy.

3. Accounts, teams and responsibility

A business account may be linked to your personal account; the two are distinct identities, and actions taken in the business identity bind the company. The separation also protects the platform's integrity: your personal identity remains a consumer bound by the Reviewer Guidelines — including the rule that you never review your own or a competitor's business. Paid plans may include team seats with roles; you decide who joins your team, and the company is responsible for everything its team members do on the platform — including their replies, invitations, API usage and compliance with these Business Terms. Remove team members promptly when they leave the company. Keep credentials confidential; you are responsible for activity under your accounts as described in the Terms of Service.

4. Replying to reviews

Replies are free on every plan, forever. Replies are public, must be civil and professional, must not disclose the reviewer's personal data beyond what the reviewer already made public (no real names the reviewer didn't use, no order details revealing identity, no "we know where you live" of any kind), must not be used for marketing spam, and must not pressure the reviewer to delete truthful content. A reply may correct facts, apologise, explain, offer to resolve the issue through your normal support channels — that is exactly what replies are for. Threatening reviewers with legal action through the reply function, or conditioning a refund on review deletion, violates these Business Terms and the Acceptable Use Policy.

A practical note from the data: how a company answers criticism is among the most-read content on its profile. A factual, non-defensive reply to a one-star review persuades future customers more effectively than ten unanswered five-star reviews — which is to say, the conduct these rules require is also the conduct that works.

5. Inviting customers to review — the fairness rules

Review invitations (manual, bulk or automated via the API) are powerful, so they come with bright-line rules. These rules are not TrustRating pedantry: consumer-protection law across our markets — the EU's unfair commercial practices rules, the FTC's endorsement rules in the US, and their counterparts elsewhere — prohibits fake and misleadingly curated reviews, and regulators fine companies for practices this section bans. Following these rules keeps you compliant with more than our terms. Invite everyone or invite neutrally: you must not select recipients based on how happy you expect them to be ("cherry-picking") and must not operate gating flows that steer satisfied customers to TrustRating while diverting dissatisfied ones to a private form. No incentives: you must not offer money, discounts, loyalty points, prize draws or anything else of value for a review, for a positive review, or for editing or deleting one — this corrupts the data and is prohibited on both sides under the Reviewer Guidelines. Real transactions only: invitations may be sent only to actual customers about actual transactions, within a reasonable time after the experience. Lawful contact: you warrant you may lawfully email each invitee (see the Data Processing Addendum for how we process invitee data on your behalf); every invitation includes unsubscribe handling, and suppression requests are honoured platform-wide. No self-dealing: employees, owners and their households must not review the business, and you must not commission reviews from anyone. Violations lead to removal of tainted reviews, invitation suspension, score-integrity investigation and the sanctions in Section 11.

6. Profile accuracy and the verified badge

Information you publish about your company — name, domain, description, categories, contact details, news posts — must be truthful and kept current; a profile that quietly keeps a defunct address or a discontinued guarantee is misleading consumers on our pages, which we treat as our problem too. The verified badge signals that the company controls its stated domain and has completed verification under the Company Claims & Domain Verification Policy; it is not an endorsement, not a score booster, and it is removed if verification lapses or was obtained by misrepresentation. Company news posts are subject to the Acceptable Use Policy and must be recognisable as company communication, never disguised as independent content.

7. Scores, AI assessments and disputes

You acknowledge that TrustScores and AI model assessments are automated opinions based on evidence available at the time, that they change in both directions as reviews and public information evolve, and that a score is not a deliverable we owe you at any level. Plan features never touch the score: buying more invitations gets more of your genuine customers heard, which helps precisely to the extent your service is actually good — that is the intended and only mechanism by which spending money here correlates with reputation. We owe you a fair process: the published methodology applied equally to everyone, fraud protection through TrustGuard (a coordinated attack on your company is quarantined, not averaged in — see the Moderation & Appeals Policy), the ability to report rule-breaking reviews with evidence, the right to request a re-scan of AI assessments from your panel, and the dispute route in the Content Integrity, Scoring & IP Policy. You agree not to sue us over the mere fact that lawful reviews or a lawful score are unfavourable; this does not limit rights that cannot be limited by law.

8. Paid services

Plans, entitlements, trials, renewals, cancellation, dunning and the courtesy-grant mechanism are governed by the Subscription, Billing & Cancellation Terms; payment methods, invoicing, refunds and chargebacks by the Payments & Refunds Policy; widgets by the Widget & Embedding Terms; API, webhooks and the affiliate program by the API, Webhooks & Affiliate Program Terms. Those documents are incorporated into these Business Terms for the services they cover.

9. Publicity

While your company is on the platform, we may display its name, logo and public profile data in the directory, categories, search, leaderboards, comparisons and trust reports — that is the Service working as intended. We will not state that your company endorses TrustRating without consent. You may state truthfully that your company is on TrustRating and display your live score using the official widgets and the brand rules in the Content Integrity, Scoring & IP Policy; you may not fake, alter or cherry-pick score displays.

10. Confidentiality and non-public data

Your business panel may expose non-public analytics and tools. You may use them for your company's internal purposes and may not resell or republish them as a dataset. Conversely, TrustRating treats your non-public billing details and support communications confidentially under the Privacy Policy and, where applicable, the DPA. Neither side's confidentiality covers what was public to begin with — your reviews, your score and your replies are the public record, and no confidentiality clause anywhere in our documents can be read as restricting anyone's discussion of them.

11. Breach and enforcement against businesses

Where a company breaches these Business Terms — most seriously through review manipulation, gating, incentivised reviews, retaliation against reviewers, badge misrepresentation or API abuse — we may, proportionately: remove offending content and tainted reviews; suspend invitations, widgets or API access; add a public integrity notice to the profile where consumers need the warning; suspend or revoke the claim and the verified badge; terminate subscriptions for cause (fees for the elapsed period are not refunded where the law permits); and terminate accounts. The appeal route in the Moderation & Appeals Policy applies to business sanctions too.

12. Term, termination and what survives

These Business Terms apply while you maintain a business account or claimed profile. You may end a subscription per the billing terms and may release your claim at any time; we may terminate for cause as above or with reasonable notice where we discontinue a service. Wind-down is orderly in both directions: your billing history and documents remain retrievable for the retention period tax law demands, exportable data can be exported before closure, and nothing about ending the commercial relationship is allowed to hold your company's public record hostage — in either direction. Ending a subscription or releasing a claim does not delete the company profile or its genuine reviews — the public record persists, unclaimed, exactly as it would for any company. Clauses that by nature survive (licences to published content, disclaimers, liability limits, integrity commitments) survive.

13. Warranties, liability and indemnity (B2B)

Business use of the Service is at business risk: the Service is provided "as is", and to the maximum extent permitted by law our aggregate liability to a business customer in any twelve-month period is capped at the fees that customer paid us in that period. We are not liable for lost profits, lost revenue, loss of goodwill or the commercial consequences of reviews, scores or their display. You will indemnify us against third-party claims arising from your content, your invitations (including claims from your customers about how you obtained their contact data), your breach of these Business Terms or your violation of law. Nothing here limits liability for fraud, wilful misconduct or anything that cannot be limited by law.

14. General

Notices to businesses may be given by email to the account address or in the business panel; keep both monitored, since billing, verification and moderation deadlines run from delivery. Agencies operating accounts for clients act as the client's agent — the client company remains the contracting party, is bound by everything done in its name, and can demand handover of access at any time. Operators managing several legitimate brands maintain a claim per company and must keep each profile's activity separate; cross-promoting one owned brand through another's profile, or shuffling reviews between related entities, is manipulation. You may not assign these Business Terms without our consent; we may assign to a successor of the Service. If a provision is unenforceable the rest stands. These Business Terms plus the incorporated documents are the entire business agreement, and the general provisions of the Terms of Service (governing law, disputes, force majeure, changes) apply equally here. Questions: contact us — sales and support answer business questions daily, and asking before acting is free.