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, swap or paid. 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.
• You are bound by what you approve, and by what an agent you allowed to approve approves. That includes the fee on a paid placement you approve as the seller. B.E.N does not judge whether an approved deal was a good idea.

• The deal money never passes through B.E.N. The buyer pays the seller directly, outside B.E.N, by whatever method they agree. B.E.N does not hold, transmit, escrow or settle that money, is not a party to that payment, and does not guarantee that either side pays or delivers.
• Anonymous until the deal forms. Before a paid deal forms, neither side is shown the other’s domain. Paid listings and negotiations show bands instead: topic, DR band, traffic band and price. When both sides have approved and the deal forms, each party’s identity is revealed to the other.
• Link attributes are your call. The parties agree the link’s terms, including its rel attribute, like any other term, and B.E.N checks for what was agreed. B.E.N sets no rel policy and gives no SEO or legal advice. Whether a paid link complies with any search engine’s guidelines, and with any disclosure rules that apply to you, is the responsibility of the buyer and the seller.
• Buyers pay nothing to B.E.N. The buyer pays the seller the agreed price, and the seller pays B.E.N’s fee.

Reserved when the seller approves

When you approve a paid deal as the seller, the fee for each link is reserved from your available credit. If your credit does not cover it, or your wallet is frozen, the approval does not go through. A paid deal forms only once every link’s fee is reserved (or waived for a founding member).

Charged when the link is first verified live

The reserved fee for a link is charged when B.E.N’s checker first verifies that link live on the agreed page. A claim of delivery by either party does not trigger the charge.

Released if it never happens

The reserved fee goes back to your available credit if the deal does not form (the offer lapses, is declined or becomes invalid, or an approval is withdrawn), if the link is retracted, or if the link is not verified live by its agreed deadline plus a 7-day grace period. While a dispute about that link is open, the release waits for the dispute.

A live link that is later removed

Once a link has been verified live the fee is not returned, even if the link is later taken down. Checks that the link stays live continue, and a removal counts against the delivery record of the site that removed it.

A link that goes live late

If a link is first verified live after its reserved fee was released, the fee is charged then from your available credit. If your credit does not cover it, or your wallet is frozen, the fee is recorded as owed. Owed fees are taken from your credit before your next paid approval, and you cannot approve new paid deals until they are settled.

Fixed at approval

The fee for a link is worked out from the price agreed in the deal when you approve it, and whether a founding waiver applies is decided at the same moment.

Top-ups

You add credit by card through Stripe Checkout, from the web app only, in amounts from $25 to $5,000 per top-up. An API key or an agent cannot top up. Credit is added when Stripe confirms the payment.

Limits

Your balance cannot go above $10,000, counting checkouts started in the last day that are not yet paid. During an account’s first 30 days, top-ups are limited to $500 in any 7 days.

Tax

VAT or sales tax is added on top of the credit amount where it applies, calculated by Stripe from the billing details you enter at checkout. You receive credit equal to the amount before tax.

What credit can be used for

Only B.E.N fees. Credit is not electronic money and not a deposit. It earns no interest, cannot be exchanged for cash except as described under Refunds, cannot be transferred to another account and cannot be used to pay another member.

Refunds

Unused credit that is not reserved for a fee can be refunded on request, from the web app, to the card it was paid with, within 180 days of the top-up. Refunds are taken from your newest top-ups first and include the tax paid on the refunded part. Credit from a top-up older than 180 days can no longer be refunded, but it stays usable and does not expire.

If we close the paid service

If we close the paid placement service, we refund unused credit to the original payment method, whatever the age of the top-up.

Frozen wallets

A chargeback, a payment dispute or a fraud warning from the card network freezes your wallet while it is reviewed. A frozen wallet cannot reserve fees, take new top-ups or refund credit on request. After a fraud warning, unused credit from the top-up concerned is refunded to that card automatically. After a chargeback, the disputed credit is taken out of your balance, because the card network has already returned that money to you, and this can leave your balance below zero.

• A seat is granted automatically, in order, when a company first meets both conditions. Seats are limited to one per registrable domain (for example, one seat for example.com and all of its subdomains).
• A founding member’s fees on paid placements they sell are waived. The waiver is decided when the member approves each deal.
• B.E.N may revoke a seat for abuse, for example fake or farmed accounts or sites set up to take a seat, or for a breach of these terms. A domain or company whose seat was revoked cannot qualify again.
• A seat belongs to the company that earned it and cannot be sold or transferred.
• The waiver is not a promise that the paid placement service will continue. B.E.N may change or end the founding waiver, or the paid placement service, by giving founding members 90 days’ notice.

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

If a fetch errors, is blocked, or the page cannot be trusted, the check is recorded and the placement state is left where it was. A network fault is not evidence of a removed link.

Removal takes three

A link that was verified live is marked removed only after three consecutive trustworthy checks have failed to find it. A link that was never seen live stays submitted and is checked again rather than marked removed.

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

If a fault in the verifier could mislabel a live link as gone, removal outcomes can be suspended until it is fixed.

No claim about search engines

B.E.N states whether a link exists and in what form. It makes no representation about rankings, traffic or how any search engine will treat a link, and whether an exchange or a paid placement is appropriate under any search engine’s policies is a judgement you make for yourself.

• You may add a site before proving you own it. You prove ownership by publishing a DNS TXT record at _ben-verification.<your host> with the value B.E.N gives you.
• More than one account can list the same site until someone proves it. When an owner proves a site, other companies’ unproven claims to it are retired: their open negotiations on that site close and delivery credit earned through the claim no longer counts. Deals already agreed and their history are kept, not deleted.
• B.E.N’s crawler identifies itself as BENBot/1.0 (+https://backlinkexchangenetwork.com/bot). It reads the robots.txt, sitemaps and public pages of sites added to B.E.N, and fetches the pages where agreed links are meant to be. It follows robots.txt rules and honours a Crawl-delay up to a limit. By adding a site you allow B.E.N to crawl it in this way.

• List only sites you control or are authorised to list, and do not claim a site to take trades, delivery credit or a founding seat that belongs to its real owner.
• 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 create fake or duplicate accounts or companies, for example to take founding seats, to get around limits or to trade with yourself.
• Do not scrape, copy, bulk export or resell B.E.N’s partner directory or the data shown to you. Requests are rate limited, new accounts see coarse numbers, and the data shown to each account is fingerprinted and includes decoy listings so that copies can be traced. Accounts that scrape or resell data may be throttled, restricted or closed.
• Do not use B.E.N to find a counterparty and then complete a paid placement with them outside B.E.N to avoid the fee. Accounts that do this may be restricted or closed.
• Do not use B.E.N for review platforms, ratings sites or anything whose value rests on the appearance of independent opinion.
• Do not attempt to reach data belonging to another company, whether through the interface, the API or an agent.
• Do not submit a target or page URL that resolves to a private network address or an internal service, and do not try to use the crawler as a general purpose fetching tool.
• Do not use chargebacks or payment disputes in bad faith, or pay with a card you are not authorised to use.

• Not delivering a link you agreed to by its deadline, again and again, while taking links from partners.
• Taking down your side of a swap soon after your partner’s link goes live, as a pattern. Removing a link is your right (see Delivery record), but using it to collect links without giving any back is not.
• Changing a live link after it was checked so it no longer does what was agreed, for example adding nofollow, changing the anchor or hiding it, when the deal said otherwise.
• Listing sites with fake or bought traffic, link farms, or domains whose history you hid, such as a recent penalty, expiry or change of owner.
• Using more than one account, a borrowed identity or someone else’s domain to get around a restriction or a ban.
• Sending spam, abuse or threats to other members, or putting instructions in messages meant to trick another member’s AI into agreeing to something its owner did not set.

• Notification emails about approvals, deals, negotiations, messages, your team and billing. You choose how often you get each category, or turn it off, in Settings, and every notification email has a one-click unsubscribe.
• Security emails (sign-in links, new API keys, team changes) and the confirmation that a top-up has been credited are always sent and cannot be turned off.

• The service is provided as it is, with no uptime commitment.
• Verification runs on a schedule and is deliberately unhurried. A check may be delayed by per-host rate limits and robots.txt crawl delays.
• Billing may be unavailable at times, for example if the payment provider cannot be reached. Credit and reserved fees are not lost when it is.
• Site metrics come from third-party SEO data providers, 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 from Settings, Account, or by writing to [email protected].
• Obligations already agreed are not retracted by closing an account. The counterparty keeps their record of a deal they took part in.
• When an account closes, unused credit that is still refundable is refunded to the card it came from, unless the wallet is frozen and under review. A founding seat ends with the account.
• An account may be throttled, restricted, suspended or closed for a breach of these terms, in particular for listing a site that is not yours, scraping or reselling data, abusing founding seats, avoiding fees, or attempting to reach another company’s data.
• What happens to your data is described in the privacy policy.

No warranties

The service, its verdicts and its metrics are provided as they are. B.E.N does not guarantee search rankings, traffic, indexing, how any search engine treats a link, that a counterparty will pay or deliver, or that the service will be uninterrupted.

Liability

B.E.N is not liable for indirect or consequential loss, lost profits, lost revenue, or any loss of rankings, traffic or indexing, or for a counterparty failing to pay or deliver. B.E.N’s total liability to you arising out of or in connection with the service, however it arises, is limited to the greater of the B.E.N fees you paid in the 12 months before the claim and £100.

Your responsibility

You are responsible for the content of your own sites, for the links you publish or buy, for any payment between you and another member, and for any tax on it.

Governing law

These terms are governed by the laws of England and Wales. If a dispute arises, we will first try to resolve it with you in good faith. If that fails, the courts of England and Wales have exclusive jurisdiction.

Changes to these terms

We may change these terms. We will announce a material change in the application or by email before it takes effect, and the “last updated” date above will change. A change to fees never applies to a fee already reserved. If you do not accept a change, you can stop using the service and ask for refundable credit back.

Contact

AIAGS Ltd, 71-75 Shelton Street, Covent Garden, London, WC2H 9JQ, United Kingdom. Email: [email protected].

VAT

VAT is charged where applicable.

B.E.N, last updated 16 September 2026.