Terms of Service

These Terms of Service ("Terms") govern your use of Toutmark's ("Toutmark," "we," "us," "our") services, including the Toutmark dashboard, CMS integrations, API, and all related features (collectively, "Service"). By accessing or using Toutmark, you agree to be bound by these Terms.

1. Acceptance of Terms

By clicking "I agree," creating an account, or using the Service in any way, you accept these Terms in full. If you do not accept them, you must not use the Service. These Terms, along with our Privacy Policy and EULA, form the complete agreement between you and Toutmark.

2. Service Description

Toutmark is an AI citation platform that helps brands get cited by ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini, and Google AI Overviews. We provide:

• Automated content optimization via OAuth and API integrations with Shopify, WordPress, Webflow, Ghost, Sanity, Contentful, and other CMS platforms
• LLM-powered content generation and rewriting aligned to your brand voice
• Review site management (G2, Capterra)
• HARO pitch coordination, press release drafting and submission coordination, and social media posting
• Off-site AI citation work including Wikidata entity management

2a. Spokesperson Authorization, Quote Attribution, and Customer Indemnification

Customer Authorization to Attribute Quotes. When you designate a person as your "Spokesperson" through the Toutmark onboarding flow (whether yourself, an officer, employee, contractor, or any other person you name), you represent and warrant to Toutmark that:

1. You have full legal authority — both from the named individual personally and (where the individual speaks in a corporate capacity) from your company's leadership and legal counsel — to authorize Toutmark to draft quotes attributed to that Spokesperson on the topics you have listed in the Spokesperson's "expertise areas" field.
2. The Spokesperson is authentically qualified to speak on each listed expertise area and is not a fictitious or composite persona, a deceased person, a former employee, or any individual whose endorsement could be construed as unauthorized under FTC Endorsement Guides, state right-of-publicity statutes, or applicable common-law doctrines.
3. You will keep the Spokesperson's record current. If the Spokesperson leaves your employment, becomes incapacitated, retracts authorization, or is otherwise unavailable, you will update or remove the Spokesperson record in your dashboard within 48 hours.
4. For regulated customers (registered investment advisors, broker-dealers, healthcare providers, attorneys, insurance producers, lenders, crypto/digital-asset firms, real estate brokers, telehealth, MLM, tax/CPA), your designated Compliance Contact has reviewed the Spokesperson's expertise areas and approved them as appropriate for your firm's regulator-defined scope of practice.

Customer Acceptance of Responsibility for Submitted Pitches and Releases. You acknowledge and agree that Toutmark is the agent and you are the principal for all HARO pitches, press releases, and other public communications submitted under your name or your Spokesperson's name. You retain ultimate responsibility for the truthfulness, accuracy, and regulatory compliance of every quote, release, and pitch attributed to your company, your Spokesperson, or your Approver, regardless of whether you reviewed the specific item before submission. Toutmark provides drafting and submission services; the quotes and content represent your communications.

Customer Indemnification of Toutmark. You will indemnify, defend, and hold harmless Toutmark, its agents, officers, contractors, and affiliates from and against any and all third-party claims, demands, regulatory actions, proceedings, damages, settlements, judgments, and reasonable attorneys' fees that arise out of or relate to: (i) any quote, statement, or representation attributed to your Spokesperson or Approver in any HARO pitch, press release, or other public communication submitted by Toutmark on your behalf; (ii) any factual error, omission, or material misstatement in such pitch or release; (iii) any claim that a quote or release is unauthorized, defamatory, false, misleading, or in violation of any law, regulation, or third-party right; (iv) any allegation that a Spokesperson designation was inaccurate or unauthorized; or (v) any breach of your representations in this Section 2a. This indemnification applies regardless of whether your approval mode was full_auto_approve, batch_at_onboarding, or per_pitch_required.

2c. Comparative Content Policy

Toutmark's comparative-content policy stacks two layers. Layer 1 applies to all customers regardless of industry. Layer 2 differs by industry tier.

Layer 1 — No Direct-Competitor Comparisons (applies to ALL customers). Toutmark will not name, identify, rank, criticize, or make comparative claims about your direct competitors in any content drafted, edited, submitted, or published on your behalf, including HARO pitches, EIN press releases, on-site paragraph rewrites, Q&A pages, education pages, rankings pages, blog posts, social posts, llms.txt content, schema text fields, or any other surface. This protects both parties from trade-libel, Lanham Act § 43(a) false-advertising, state UDAP / "Little FTC Act," FTC Section 5, and tortious-interference exposure.

Forbidden under Layer 1: naming competitor companies, products, brands, or services; implicitly identifying a competitor in ways industry-savvy readers would recognize; quantitative comparisons against any named or identifiable entity; rankings that order named competitors; republishing third-party comparative content that names competitors.

Rare opt-in path (Layer 1 exception): for specific named-competitor content, you may pursue an opt-in attestation requiring all three of: (a) pre-clearance of the specific claim by your own attorney with documented substantiation; (b) your personal verification of the claim's accuracy; and (c) execution of a per-claim Comparative Claim Authorization in your dashboard, capturing typed verification phrase, attorney-name-on-file, timestamp, and IP. Even with all three, Toutmark's Editor may decline if substantiation is not ironclad. The Editor's decline is final.

Layer 2 — Comparison-of-any-kind rule, by tier:

If you are in a regulated industry (registered investment advisor, broker-dealer, hedge fund or PE/private credit, healthcare provider or HIPAA covered entity, attorney, insurance producer, lender or mortgage, crypto/digital-asset, real estate broker, telehealth, MLM, tax/CPA), Toutmark will not include ANY comparative claims in content drafted on your behalf — including category-level comparisons ("better than typical CRMs"), industry-baseline comparisons ("above the industry average"), customer-own-past-performance comparisons ("30% improvement vs. last quarter"), or legacy-versus-modern framing ("unlike traditional approaches"). This blanket no-comparisons rule maps to your regulator's specific restrictions on comparative communications: SEC Marketing Rule 206(4)-1, FINRA Rule 2210, state medical board and FTC healthcare advertising rules, state bar attorney advertising rules (including ABA Model Rule 7.1), state insurance commissioner rules, and analogous regulator regimes. Toutmark's flat-zero rule for regulated customers exists to preserve your regulator-compliance posture; it cannot be opted-out of. Customers whose AI citation strategy depends on comparative content should engage a different vendor.

If you are not in a regulated industry, comparisons are permitted in content Toutmark drafts on your behalf — at the category level, industry-baseline level, customer-own-past-performance level, or industry-trend-observation level. However, every factual claim within a comparison must be source-verifiable: a public study, a published industry report, a customer-supplied internal data point with documented methodology, a published benchmark, or a similarly citable source. Toutmark's Editor will not include hallucinated facts in drafted content; comparative claims that cannot be verified against a source will be rejected. You may supply your own benchmark data at onboarding or per-claim; you may also rely on Toutmark to source public benchmarks where appropriate, with citation.

Cherry-picking guard. Even with verified facts, Toutmark's Editor reserves the right to reject a comparative draft if the comparison is factually correct on a single dimension but materially misleading in context (e.g., the customer's product is faster but materially worse on accuracy or reliability that buyers would care about). The cherry-picking-in-context check applies to all non-regulated comparisons.

Customer indemnification (reaffirmed). The Section 2a customer indemnification applies in full to any content involving comparisons (Layer 1 or Layer 2). Where you supply benchmark data for a non-regulated comparative claim, you additionally warrant that the data and methodology you supplied are accurate.

2b. HARO Pitches & EIN Press Releases — Customer-Approval Gate

Toutmark coordinates HARO/Connectively pitches and EIN Presswire press releases on behalf of customers, but every pitch and every release attributed to your company or your designated spokesperson is subject to an explicit customer-approval gate before submission:

• Spokesperson-driven only. Every HARO pitch attributes a quote to a specific named individual (a spokesperson you designate at onboarding) speaking within the narrow expertise areas you list at onboarding. Toutmark does not invent quotes, does not invent expertise, and will not pitch on a topic outside your spokesperson's listed expertise without your prior written addition of that topic to the spokesperson's record.
• Customer-approval modes. At onboarding you choose one of three approval modes for each off-site pipeline (HARO and EIN separately): (i) `full_auto_approve` — only available to non-regulated customers; pitches/releases route directly to submission after Toutmark Editor approval, with retroactive awareness email to the spokesperson; (ii) `batch_at_onboarding` — default; pitches/releases require a 30-second-to-5-minute customer review via dashboard or email reply before submission; (iii) `per_pitch_required` — mandatory for regulated customers; every individual pitch/release requires explicit Approve from your designated CCO/compliance contact. You may change your approval mode at any time in your dashboard settings; the change applies to pitches drafted after the change.
• Full-auto-approve mode — explicit risk acceptance. If you select full_auto_approve mode for HARO or EIN press releases (which is opt-in only, requires you to click through a separate confirmation modal at the time of selection, and is not available to regulated customers), you expressly acknowledge and agree that:
  1. Toutmark will submit pitches and releases under your Spokesperson's or Approver's name without you (or any human at your company) reviewing the specific item beforehand. You waive your right to per-item review for items submitted under this mode.
  2. Toutmark's Editor performs an authenticity, news-hook, and topical-fit check before any submission, but Editor is an automated system and may produce false negatives. You acknowledge that an off-tone, off-topic, or off-brand pitch could therefore be submitted under your name.
  3. If a pitch or release is submitted under your name in this mode and you later object to its content, accuracy, tone, or framing, you waive any claim against Toutmark for that submission. Your sole remedy is to request that Toutmark draft a correction or retraction (which Toutmark will do at no additional charge for non-regulated customers, subject to the original deadline window).
  4. You assume all financial, legal, regulatory, and reputational responsibility for any consequences arising from a pitch or release submitted under full_auto_approve mode. The customer indemnification in Section 2a applies fully, with no Toutmark fault required.
  5. This mode does not survive cancellation in any form: if a pitch is in flight when you cancel and was queued under full_auto_approve, Toutmark will continue to submit it under the rule. To stop in-flight submissions, you must change your approval mode in the dashboard to batch_at_onboarding at least 24 hours before cancellation.
  Toutmark will not knowingly submit a pitch under full_auto_approve if Editor detects a material expertise mismatch, factual error, or compliance-banned-category trigger; in those cases Toutmark routes back to draft regardless of mode.
• Regulated industries. If you are in a regulated industry (registered investment advisor, broker-dealer, healthcare provider, attorney, insurance producer, mortgage/lender, crypto/digital-asset, real estate broker, telehealth, MLM, tax/CPA), you cannot select `full_auto_approve` and you are required to provide a designated compliance contact with sign-off authority on outbound communications. For securities-industry customers (Marketing Rule 206(4)-1), every pitch and release additionally requires Accept on a visual preview rendered in your dashboard.
• Submission is manual. EIN Presswire submission is performed by Toutmark's Owner manually via the EIN web dashboard — Toutmark agents never auto-purchase wire packages, never auto-submit releases via API or proxy. HARO submission also defaults to manual paste-submit by Toutmark's Owner, regardless of customer count. You are not charged separately for these activities; they are included in your subscription tier (HARO is in all paid tiers; EIN Presswire is Enterprise tier only, 1 release per quarter).
• Audit log. Every pitch and release retains a tamper-evident audit record with timestamps, content, your approval channel and timestamp, and submission method. Regulated customers' audit records are retained for at least 7 years to support your books-and-records obligations to your regulator. Non-regulated retention is 90 days.
• Irrevocability of distributed releases. Once an EIN Presswire release is distributed, it is public-record and cannot be withdrawn from the distribution network. Toutmark can draft a correction release on your behalf at your request, subject to the same approval gate. Toutmark's liability for an inaccurate distributed release is capped per Section 9 ("Limitation of Liability") of these Terms, and Toutmark's Editor + your customer-approval gate are the contractual safeguards against inaccurate distribution.

3. Account Creation & Eligibility

To use Toutmark, you must:

• Be at least 18 years old
• Have the legal authority to enter into this agreement on behalf of your company or yourself
• Provide accurate, current, and complete information during signup
• Maintain the confidentiality of your account credentials
• Operate from a US-based company. Toutmark currently serves United States-based companies only. If your company's primary country of operation is in the European Union, the United Kingdom, the European Economic Area, or Switzerland, signup is unavailable to you at this time. We expect to launch EU operations after we hit a customer-count threshold that allows us to absorb the regulatory cost (GDPR, UK GDPR, EU AI Act, ePrivacy) responsibly. Existing customers who relocate their company HQ to the EU during their subscription will be grandfathered through the end of the current annual term but will not be eligible for renewal until EU operations open.

You are responsible for all activity on your account. You must notify us immediately if you discover unauthorized access. Toutmark reserves the right to suspend or terminate accounts that violate these Terms.

4. Pricing & Payment

Live Phase (Current)

Live Phase Pricing

• Monthly Tiers: $79 (Starter), $149 (Growth), $229 (Scale) per month
• Billing Cycle: Automatic monthly renewal on the same calendar day via Stripe
• Pro-Rata First Month: If you sign up mid-month, your first charge will be pro-rated; subsequent charges are full monthly
• Cancellation: Cancel at the end of any billing period by sending an email to [email protected]. Cancellation takes effect on the next billing date; you retain access through the end of the period already paid
• 90-Day Trial Exit Clause: If you are a new customer in your first 90 days of Live Phase service and are unsatisfied, you may exit your subscription with a full refund of the initial month's charge. After 90 days, standard cancellation terms apply (end-of-period, no refund).

For complete refund terms, including failed-install refunds and chargeback policy, see our Refund Policy.

Price-Lock Guarantee for Existing Subscribers

• What this means: If you subscribe to Starter at $79/month and we later raise the published Starter price to $99/month, you will continue to pay $79/month as long as your subscription remains active and uninterrupted. The new $99 price will apply only to subscribers who sign up after the change takes effect.
• What breaks the lock: Cancellation followed by re-subscription. If you cancel and later re-subscribe at any tier, you will be charged at the then-current published rate for that tier — the previously-locked rate is no longer available. A failed payment that causes a 30-day suspension followed by termination (per "Payment Methods & Failures" above) is treated as cancellation for purposes of this lock.
• Tier upgrades: If you change tiers (for example, Starter → Growth), you pay the rate that was published for the new tier on the day you first started any active Toutmark subscription, OR the current published rate for the new tier — whichever is lower. Tier downgrades follow the same rule.
• Notice of changes for new subscribers: When we change the published price for a tier, we will announce the change on toutmark.com/pricing and on the homepage at least 30 days in advance.
• Onboarding fee: A one-time $25 onboarding fee applies at signup for non-founding subscribers. Founding-cohort customers (first 25 confirmed paying signups) have this fee permanently waived as part of the founding benefits. The fee covers the extra setup work we do in your first week to get your site up to standard. The current onboarding fee is disclosed on the pricing page before signup. Existing subscribers are never retroactively charged a higher onboarding fee than the one that applied at the time of their signup.
• Limits of the lock: The price-lock guarantee applies to the published tier subscription price only. It does not apply to (i) one-off services such as press-wire submissions or external paid platforms, (ii) sales tax, value-added tax, or other government-imposed charges that may change over time, (iii) optional add-ons or upgrades disclosed separately, or (iv) currency conversion adjustments if you pay in a non-USD currency.
• Termination of guarantee: Toutmark may discontinue the price-lock guarantee for new subscribers at any time by amending these Terms with at least 30 days' notice. Any price-lock already in force for an existing subscriber remains in force regardless of future amendments to this Section.

Payment Methods & Failures

• We process payments through Stripe. You authorize Stripe to charge the payment method on file each month
• If a charge fails, we will attempt retry on the following business day. If the second attempt fails, your account will be suspended
• For suspended accounts: payment must be made within 30 days or the account and all associated data will be terminated
• All prices are in USD (US dollars)

Chargebacks and Payment Disputes

If you believe a charge is incorrect, please email [email protected] before initiating a chargeback with your card issuer or bank. We respond to billing questions within one business day and process valid refund requests promptly. Most disputes can be resolved without a chargeback.

If a chargeback or payment dispute is filed against a Toutmark charge, the following apply:

• Subscription pause during review. Your subscription is automatically paused as soon as we receive notice of the dispute, and remains paused until the dispute is resolved. We do not deliver new work to an account while a payment is under dispute. Your dashboard will display a "Subscription paused — payment dispute under review" banner during this period.
• Evidence package. Within 24 hours of receiving notice, we compile a complete evidence package covering: the disputed invoice, your signup record (timestamp, plan selected, IP address), proof of delivery (the most recent Citation Report, paragraph-rewrite count, schema deployments, blog posts, and any other deliverables under your plan), the full email thread between you and Toutmark, and your dashboard activity log. This package is submitted to your card issuer through Stripe within the dispute response window.
• If the dispute is decided in your favor (chargeback upheld): your subscription remains canceled. Your account will be flagged with `chargeback_history` and you will not be able to re-sign up through the standard signup flow; future signup requests will require manual review and approval by Toutmark's owner. If you are a member of the founding-25 cohort, your founding status (locked founder price + waived onboarding fee + any other founding benefits) is revoked permanently as a condition of this outcome.
• If the dispute is decided in our favor (chargeback reversed): we reactivate your subscription, you keep your existing plan and pricing, no penalty flags are applied to your account, and we send you a confirmation email so you know service is resumed. No further action required from you.
• Fraud-related disputes. If a chargeback is filed under a fraud category (e.g., "unauthorized transaction") and Stripe's evidence indicates the cardholder did in fact authorize and use the service, Toutmark may pursue collection of the disputed amount plus any chargeback fees Stripe assesses.
• Preferred path. We strongly prefer to resolve billing concerns directly via email rather than through the chargeback process. If you have a legitimate refund request that falls within our refund policy (see the Refund Policy), email [email protected] and we will process it without requiring a chargeback. Most chargeback fees and review periods can be avoided entirely.

5. Acceptable Use

You agree not to:

• Use the Service for illegal purposes or in violation of any laws or regulations
• Scrape, reverse-engineer, or attempt to gain unauthorized access to Toutmark infrastructure
• Use the Service to send spam, harass, defame, or threaten any person or organization
• Distribute malware, trojans, or other malicious code
• Infringe on anyone's intellectual property rights
• Impersonate others or misrepresent your affiliation with a company or brand
• Overload our servers with requests designed to degrade service for other users
• Use the Service to generate fraudulent reviews, fake testimonials, or artificially manipulated ratings

Violation of these terms will result in immediate suspension and potential termination of your account. For detailed prohibited uses, see our Acceptable Use Policy.

6. OAuth Token Permissions & Usage

When you authorize Toutmark to connect to third-party platforms (Cloudflare, Vercel, Shopify, WordPress, etc.), you grant us permission to:

• Read and analyze your site content
• Publish content via our CMS plugins and APIs
• Manage your CMS or hosting integration
• Access platform-specific APIs for the stated purposes (e.g., posting to LinkedIn via Composio)

We will only use OAuth tokens for the explicit purposes outlined in our onboarding. We do not use your tokens to access unrelated services, monitor your account for purposes beyond the AI citation service, or share tokens with third parties except as required to execute the Service (e.g., Composio for social posting). Tokens are encrypted AES-256-GCM in Cloudflare KV with a 180-day TTL after which they must be re-authorized.

7. Intellectual Property

Your Content

You retain all ownership rights to content on your website. Toutmark does not claim ownership of your site content, brand materials, or customer data.

Our IP

Toutmark owns all right, title, and interest in:

• Our algorithms, LLM prompts, and brand-routing logic
• The Toutmark dashboard and software
• Our CMS plugins and integration code
• Any generated content templates or frameworks

License to You

We grant you a limited, non-exclusive, revocable license to use the Service for your own business purposes during your active subscription. You may not redistribute, resell, or sublicense Toutmark's software, except as explicitly permitted for SEO and AI citation resellers (which is our core market segment).

8. Warranty Disclaimer

AI citation work is an emerging field with evolving best practices. Results depend on market conditions, competition, and factors outside our control. Toutmark provides tools and strategy; success is not guaranteed.

9. Limitation of Liability

IN NO EVENT SHALL TOUTMARK BE LIABLE FOR:

• Direct, indirect, incidental, special, or consequential damages (including lost profits, data loss, or business interruption)
• Damages arising from third-party integrations, service failures by Cloudflare, Stripe, or other partners
• User errors, misconfiguration, or misuse of the Service

10. Dispute Resolution & Governing Law

• Governing Law: These Terms are governed by the laws of the State of California, without regard to conflict-of-laws principles
• Jurisdiction: Any legal action arising from or relating to these Terms shall be brought exclusively in the state or federal courts located in Los Angeles County, California
• Arbitration Option: Either party may elect to resolve disputes through binding arbitration under the American Arbitration Association (AAA) Commercial Arbitration Rules, in Los Angeles, CA. Arbitration is at each party's choice; by default, disputes proceed in court.

11. Termination

By You

You may terminate your account at any time by emailing [email protected] with the subject "Account Termination." Your account will be disabled at the end of your current billing period (no refunds for pre-paid months). All data will be deleted within 30 days per our Privacy Policy.

By Toutmark

We may terminate your account immediately if:

• You violate these Terms (especially Acceptable Use)
• Payment fails and remains unpaid for 30 days
• Your account is used for illegal purposes
• We reasonably believe the Service is being used to harm others

Upon termination, your access is revoked and data will be deleted per our Privacy Policy.

12. Modifications to These Terms

Toutmark may update these Terms at any time. We will notify you of material changes via email. Continued use of the Service after such notification constitutes acceptance of the updated Terms. If you do not agree with the changes, you may cancel your account.

13. Severability

If any provision of these Terms is found to be unenforceable or invalid, that provision will be modified to the minimum extent necessary to make it enforceable, and the remainder of the Terms will remain in full force.

14. Entire Agreement

These Terms, together with the Privacy Policy and EULA, constitute the entire agreement between you and Toutmark regarding the Service and supersede all prior agreements, understandings, and negotiations.

15. Contact Information

For questions about these Terms, contact: