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Signalword

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Terms of service

Last updated: 14 August 2026

These terms apply when you buy an audit or a monitoring plan from Signalword, and when you use our website. They are written to be read.

1. Who we are

Signalword is a trading name of HEZA Consulting (Pty) Ltd, a private company registered in South Africa under registration number 2021/445585/07.

Care of: TaxedUp, 15 Helderberg St, Valmary Park, Cape Town, 7550, South Africa

“We” and “us” mean Signalword. “You” means the person or organisation buying from us.

Contact us through our contact form.

2. Who takes your payment

Our payments are handled by Paddle, which acts as merchant of record. That means Paddle is the seller for the transaction, issues your invoice, and collects and remits any VAT or sales tax. Paddle’s own terms govern the payment itself; these terms govern the service we deliver.

Prices are in US dollars. Any tax is calculated by Paddle for your country and shown before you pay.

3. What we provide

The free score. A technical check of your website, run on request, at no charge. We test whether each AI crawler can reach your site, whether your pages can be read without JavaScript, and whether you publish the files AI systems look for. A person runs it and replies, normally within a week. It is free and provided as-is, with no commitment as to timing.

The audit. A one-off report. We test every AI crawler against your site twice — what your robots.txt says, and what your server actually does. We put 60 real customer questions to five AI assistants in three languages, each asked three times, and record whether you are named and who is named instead. We score your closest competitors on the same measures and write a prioritised action plan.

Monitoring plans. Watch, Track and Lead. Each includes a monthly technical check and an alert when your site stops being readable. Track and Lead add visibility tracking, competitor tracking and a monthly report, at the levels published on our pricing page. Lead adds a quarterly review call.

The published description of each plan on our pricing page forms part of these terms.

4. What we do not promise

Please read this section properly. It is the one that matters.

We measure. We do not guarantee outcomes. We do not promise that an AI assistant will recommend you, that your visibility will increase, that your score will improve, or that any commercial result will follow from acting on our findings.

We do not control the AI systems we measure. ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini and the others change their models, their retrieval and their behaviour without notice and without consulting anybody. A result we record today may differ tomorrow for reasons that have nothing to do with your website.

Our findings are a point in time. Every report is dated. It describes what we observed when we observed it.

AI answers are not consistent. This is why we ask every question three times and report a rate rather than a single result. Even so, a rate is a measurement of something variable, not a fixed property of your business.

We are not responsible for changes you make. Our fixes are recommendations. You or your developers decide whether and how to apply them, and you remain responsible for your own website.

5. What we do promise

Our findings are reproducible. Every technical finding can be re-tested by you or by anyone else. If a finding is wrong, tell us and we will correct it and re-issue the report at no charge.

We do not invent numbers. Every figure in a report and on this website comes from a measurement we made.

We tell you what we cannot measure. Our method page sets out the limits of what we do, and each report repeats the relevant ones.

6. Your side of it

By buying from us you confirm that:

  • You own the website you are asking us to audit, or you are authorised to act for whoever does. We may ask you to confirm this before we begin, and we may decline or refund a request where we are not satisfied.
  • The information you give us is accurate.
  • You will not use our service to gather intelligence on a business you have no connection to.

If you are acting for a client, say so when you order. That is entirely welcome — we simply need to know.

7. The free score, and fair use

The free score is offered in good faith for people considering our paid work. We limit how often it can be requested, and we may decline a request without giving reasons. Please do not automate it or submit websites in bulk.

8. Who owns what

Your report is yours. You may use it internally without restriction, share it with your developers, agency or board, and act on it however you wish.

Please do not resell or republish it as a product of your own, or present our findings as the output of another supplier.

We keep the rights to our method — our software, our question libraries, our scoring, and the report format.

We may publish anonymised aggregate statistics. Figures such as “more than 1,700 websites audited, 27% carry a critical fault” are drawn from all our work and are how we demonstrate what we know.

We will never name you publicly as an audited company, quote your findings, or identify you in aggregate figures, unless you have given us permission in writing.

9. Cancellation and refunds

We would rather tell you plainly what happens than bury it. If anything here seems unfair in your situation, write to us — most of it is what we do anyway, not a wall to hide behind.

The audit

Before we start: a full refund, no questions. We do not begin until we have confirmed your website address, so there is always a gap between your payment and any work. Tell us to stop in that gap and we return everything you paid. You do not need a reason.

After we have delivered: no automatic refund, but we stand behind the findings. An audit is work done to order. By the time you have the report we have crawled your site, put sixty questions to five AI assistants and written the analysis, and none of that can be undone or resold. What we guarantee instead is that it is right:

  • If a finding is wrong, we correct it and re-issue the report at no charge.
  • If something we reported has changed by the time you read it, we re-run that check free within 30 days.
  • If we have simply failed to deliver anything useful, tell us. We will not hide behind this paragraph.

Monthly plans

Cancel whenever you like. Email us or reply to any email we have sent. No form, no retention call, no notice period.

Cancellation takes effect at the end of the month you have already paid for, and you keep the service until then. We do not refund part of a month in progress, and we do not charge you again.

Annual plans

Within the first 30 days: a full refund, if you have not yet had a monthly report from us.

After 30 days: we refund what you paid, less the months you have used charged at our normal monthly rate.

refund = what you paid − (whole months used × the monthly price of your plan)

On a Track annual plan at $1,990, cancelling after five months returns $995. The refund reaches zero after ten months, because an annual plan is ten months’ price for twelve months’ service — at that point you have had the full value of what you paid, and the last two months are the free ones.

If your audit was included or discounted as part of an annual plan and you cancel before the year is out, the audit is charged at the price you would have paid without the plan, and that amount comes off your refund. We will show you the figures before processing anything.

Changing plans

Moving up takes effect immediately and we charge the difference for the remainder of your term. Moving down takes effect at your next renewal; we do not refund the difference mid-term, because the higher tier’s data has already been collected.

If a payment fails

Paddle will retry. If it still fails we pause the service and email you — we do not cancel your plan or delete anything. Tell us if the timing is awkward and we will work around it.

Statutory rights

If you have a statutory right to cancel — for example a cooling-off period under South Africa’s Consumer Protection Act because you bought after we contacted you directly — that right applies in full and overrides anything in this section. Ask and we will honour it.

Before you raise a chargeback

Please write to us first. A chargeback costs us a fee and takes weeks, and in every case so far the underlying problem was something we could have fixed the same day. We have never refused a refund we thought was owed.

How to cancel or ask for a refund

Reply to any email from us, or use our contact form. A person reads it. We confirm within two working days and process any refund within five.

10. Prices

If we change our prices, your price stays the same until your current term ends. We will tell you before a renewal at a new price, in time for you to decide.

11. Liability

We are a small business and our prices reflect that. So, to the fullest extent the law allows:

  • Our total liability to you is limited to the amount you have paid us in the twelve months before the claim.
  • We are not liable for indirect or consequential loss, including lost profit, lost bookings, lost revenue or loss of reputation.
  • We are not liable for the acts, changes or outages of third parties, including the AI providers we measure, our hosting, or our payment provider.

Nothing in these terms limits liability that cannot lawfully be limited, including for fraud, or for death or personal injury caused by negligence, or any right you have as a consumer under South African law.

12. Confidentiality

We treat what you tell us as confidential, and we ask the same of anything we tell you about our method. Neither of us needs to keep confidential something already public, or something we are legally required to disclose.

13. Suspending or declining service

We may decline an order or end an engagement, refunding anything unused, if we believe the request is being used to gather intelligence on a business you have no connection to, if the information you gave us was materially wrong, or if continuing would be unlawful. We will tell you why.

14. Availability

We do not offer a service level guarantee. The website, the free score and the audit pipeline may be unavailable for maintenance or for reasons outside our control. Monitoring runs monthly; if a scheduled check is missed we run it as soon as we can.

15. Changes to these terms

We may update these terms. The date at the top shows the current version. If a change materially affects a plan you are already on, we will tell you directly and it will not apply to your current term.

16. Governing law

These terms are governed by the laws of South Africa, and the South African courts have jurisdiction. This does not remove any protection you have under the mandatory law of your own country.

17. Everything else

If any part of these terms turns out to be unenforceable, the rest still stands. These terms, together with our privacy policy and the plan descriptions on our pricing page, are the whole agreement between us about the service.