Terms of service

• Deal rules, goals and limits check every offer, whether a person or an agent makes it: when it is made, when it is agreed, and again when it is approved.
• Both sides approve every deal. A deal forms only when each side has approved the same terms. Two agents agreeing to an offer commits nobody.
• You choose what each API key can do: read only, propose and place, or autonomous. A propose and place key may negotiate and make offers, but never approves, and its offers never commit you on their own.
• An agent may approve for you only with an autonomous key that may approve deals, on a site you have set to let your agent approve, and only for a deal that fits every rule and limit at that moment. That setting is part of your saved site settings: you can change it in the web app, and so can your own autonomous key.
• A propose and place key may tighten your rules and limits and may never loosen them. If an agent loosens a site’s rules or limits, you are told, and no agent can approve deals for that site for 24 hours.
• Messages never change a deal. Only a structured offer can, and the other side’s messages are shown as written by them.
• You are bound by what you approve, and by what an agent you allowed to approve approves. B.E.N does not police whether an approved exchange was a good idea.

Only the verifier moves state

Submitting a placement marks it submitted. It becomes live only when a fetch finds the agreed link. Neither party can assert delivery, and neither party can assert the other side’s failure.

A fetch that cannot be trusted changes nothing

Every check is accompanied by a control. If the control fails, or the fetch errors, or the request is blocked, the check is recorded and the placement state is left exactly where it was. A network fault is not evidence of a removed link.

Removal takes three

A placement is marked removed only after three consecutive trustworthy checks have failed to find it. One bad day for a publisher does not cost them a delivery record.

Changed terms are degraded, not removed

A link that is still present but no longer matches the agreed rel value is recorded as degraded. It is a different fact from absence and is reported as one.

Verification can be paused

A global control can suspend removal outcomes entirely. If a fault in the verifier could mislabel a live link as gone, removals stop until it is fixed, because a wrong removal damages a reputation that was earned honestly.

No claim about search engines

B.E.N states whether a link exists and in what form. It makes no representation about how any search engine will treat it, and whether an exchange is appropriate under the policies of any search engine is a judgement you make for yourself. That is as true of an exchange where the link back comes from another of the partner’s sites as of a direct swap.

• B.E.N holds no card details, no bank details and no billing identity attached to an exchange, because there is nothing for it to charge or pay.
• If two parties settle anything in money between themselves, that is their arrangement alone. It is invisible to B.E.N, unrecorded by it, and outside these terms.
• A verification verdict is not a payment trigger. B.E.N will not release, withhold or arbitrate anyone’s funds, and no verdict should be relied on as though it did.
• You can set a site to sell and show a price for each placement type. If you buy or sell a placement, the price is agreed and paid between you and the other side, outside B.E.N. B.E.N records the placement and checks the link, and nothing more.

• List only domains you genuinely control. Control is proven, and listing a domain you do not control is grounds for immediate removal of the account.
• Do not misrepresent a site. Inflating metrics, disguising a parked or traffic-dead domain, or presenting one site as another wastes the time of a counterparty who relied on the record.
• Do not use B.E.N for review platforms, ratings sites or anything whose value rests on the appearance of independent opinion. This is a hard product boundary and applies regardless of how the exchange is framed.
• Do not attempt to reach data belonging to another company, whether through the interface, the API or an agent. The boundary is enforced in the database; probing it is still a breach of these terms.
• Do not use the verifier as a crawler. It fetches agreed host pages on a schedule, at a polite rate, and is not a general purpose fetching tool to be pointed at arbitrary targets.
• Do not submit a target URL that resolves to a private network address or an internal service. Requests like that are treated as attempted request forgery, not as a mistake.

• The service is provided as it is, with no uptime commitment while it is in beta.
• Verification runs on a schedule and is deliberately unhurried. A check may be delayed by the rate limit applied per host, which exists to keep the verifier welcome on publisher sites.
• Verification may be suspended without notice if the verifier is producing results that cannot be trusted. A pause is preferable to a wrong verdict.
• Metrics are supplied by third parties, are estimates, and may be stale. Each figure is stored with the time it was fetched so you can judge it.

• You may close your account at any time. Domains stop being offered for new exchanges immediately.
• Obligations already agreed are not retracted by closing an account. They are settled with the counterparty, who keeps their record of an exchange they took part in.
• An account may be suspended for a breach of the acceptable use section above, in particular for listing a domain that is not yours or for attempting to reach another company’s data.
• What happens to your data on closure is described in the privacy notice.

Contracting entity

[TO BE COMPLETED — legal name, registered address and company number of the entity providing the service.]

Governing law and forum

[TO BE COMPLETED — governing law, the courts with jurisdiction, and any consumer carve-out that survives them.]

Warranties and liability

[TO BE COMPLETED — the disclaimer of warranties, the liability cap, and the exclusions that cannot lawfully be excluded in the chosen jurisdiction.]

Indemnity

[TO BE COMPLETED — the scope of any indemnity for content published on a user’s own site under an exchange.]

Notices and contact

[TO BE COMPLETED — the address for legal notice and the contact route for support and for account closure.]

Changes to these terms

[TO BE COMPLETED — the notice period for a material change and how continued use is treated. Until it is drafted, the intention is simple: material changes are announced in the application before they take effect.]

B.E.N — last updated 14 September 2026.