Acceptable Use Policy: API Search & Router Services

Overview and Scope

This Acceptable Use Policy ("AUP") governs all programmatic (a) API-based access to Search services and the (b) Router Services, including grounded (search-augmented) generation and inference services offered by You.com. It applies to all users including developers, organizations, and any application or automated system that queries, integrates with, or redistributes You.com services.

By calling the Services or embedding Services in your application, you agree, and you agree to ensure, that all end users in your organization abide by this policy. Continued use of the Services after review of this AUP will assume acknowledgement of adherence to these terms.

Definitions

Developer Responsibility

You are responsible for your application's compliance with this AUP, including misuse by your end users, whichever Services you use.

• You must implement safeguards (input filtering, output moderation, rate limiting) appropriate to your use-case.
• If your application uses Inference Services, you must apply those safeguards to both the prompts you send and the generated, grounded, or retrieved content you display or act on.
• If your application combines the Search API and Router Services, this AUP applies to the whole workflow, including content you pass from one Service to the other.
• If you make the Services available to End Users or other third parties, you must bind them to terms at least as protective of You.com as this AUP, use commercially reasonable efforts to monitor and enforce those terms, and notify You.com promptly at [email protected] of any material violation you become aware of. Violations by your End Users are treated as your violations.
• Router Services use models developed by third parties. Your use of those models is also subject to the applicable Model Provider's usage policies, as identified in the You.com documentation. Where a Model Provider's policy is more restrictive than this AUP, the more restrictive requirement applies. You.com may restrict or withdraw access to a model whenever its Model Providers require us to.
• If You.com identifies a violation originating from your integration, your access to one or both Services may be suspended.

Prohibited Uses: Summary

The prohibitions below apply to both Services unless the last column says otherwise.

Detailed Policy Requirements (All Services)

1. Privacy & Data Protection

Your Services integration must not:

• Attempt to gain unauthorized access to or exploit vulnerabilities in any user, network, device, or communications system, including via spoofing or social engineering.
• Collect, process, infer, or share sensitive personal data (health records, government IDs, biometrics, financial credentials, API keys, passwords) without user consent and applicable legal authority or a contract that includes appropriate regulatory agreements. This includes placing such data in prompts, conversation history, or grounding context sent to the Inference Services.
• Submit any of the following to the Services without You.com's prior written agreement: government identification numbers or copies of identity documents; health information protected under applicable law; payment card data subject to PCI DSS; financial account credentials; passwords, API keys, private keys, or other authentication secrets; personal data of children under 13; or special categories of personal data under the GDPR.
• Use Outputs to build profiles of personal or sensitive information on individuals or to re-identify any anonymized data.
• Collect or generate information that unlawfully targets or exposes individuals or groups.
• Submit photos, audio, or other biometric data for identification without explicit, informed consent.

2. Illegal Activity & Harmful Content

Your integration and applications with the Services must not generate, facilitate, or distribute:

• Child sexual abuse material (CSAM) or any content that sexualizes or exploits minors.
• Counterfeit goods, illicit drugs, or services that circumvent legal frameworks.
• Content that facilitates harassment, stalking, bullying, or threats against any individual or group.
• Discriminatory outputs affecting employment, housing, credit, or access to essential services.
• Unauthorized professional advice (legal, medical, financial) presented as authoritative.
• Content infringing third-party intellectual property, trade secrets, or privacy rights.
• Material that promotes violence, terrorism, extremism, harassment or trafficking.
• Research into, or Outputs that provide meaningful assistance in developing, producing, acquiring, or deploying chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear, or explosive weapons, or other instruments intended to cause mass harm.
• Activity that violates U.S. or other applicable export control or economic sanctions laws, including use of the Services by or for the benefit of a sanctioned person or from a comprehensively sanctioned country or region.

3. Platform Integrity & Misuse

Programmatic access imposes additional obligations beyond standard uses. You must not:

• Use the Services to generate malware, ransomware, exploits, or any code intended to compromise systems, other than for authorized security testing of systems you own or are permitted to test.
• Use Outputs to power automated spam, phishing, or unsolicited bulk messaging, or to run Listserv, Maillist or auto-responders on our outputs.
• Attempt to circumvent rate limits, safety classifiers, content filters, or any access controls built into the API or the Services.
• Run bots, scrapers, "spiders" or load-testing tools against the Services infrastructure without explicit written authorization to do so.
• Use prompt injection, jailbreaking techniques, or adversarial inputs to manipulate model or retrieval behavior, except within an approved security testing scope (see Reporting Violations).
• Copy or store for re-use significant portions of the Content of our API without contractual authorization to do so.
• Create multiple accounts, or share, sell, or transfer API keys, or spread usage across accounts, to evade rate limits, usage caps, free-tier limits, suspensions, or bans.
• Resell, sublicense, or offer the Services as a standalone API or service bureau, or use the Services to build a substantially similar or competing product, without You.com's prior written consent.

4. Harm to Individuals & Communities

Do not use the Services to produce or distribute:

• Content that discriminates against protected classes in consequential decisions (hiring, lending, housing).
• Material that promotes, normalizes, or provides instruction for self-harm, suicide, eating disorders, or substance abuse or other actions harmful to human beings.
• Content inciting violence, abuse, or physical harm against any person or group or system.
• Gratuitous depictions of violence, gore, or non-consensual sexual or intimate content.
• Content inappropriate for minors if your application may be accessed by users under 18.
• Applications directed at children under 13, or below the minimum age required by applicable law, without You.com's prior written approval.
• Defamatory, humiliating, abusive or shaming content targeting real individuals.

5. Misinformation, Deception & Fraud

Do not use the Services to:

• Generate disinformation, fabricated news, or synthetic media designed to deceive.
• Power fake-engagement services (fake reviews, social media manipulation, astroturfing).
• Create tools that facilitate plagiarism, contract cheating, or academic fraud.
• Impersonate real individuals, brands, or organizations without authorization.
• Falsely attribute AI-generated content to human authors to mislead recipients.
• Attempt to circumvent tracking, usage or payment obligations in any way.

Additional Requirements: Inference Services

Generated and grounded Outputs can be wrong, incomplete, or out of date. These requirements apply whenever you use the Inference Services, alone or together with Search APIs.

6. Grounded Outputs & Attribution

You must not:

• Present generated text as verified fact, or as authoritative professional advice, when it has not been verified.
• Remove, alter, fabricate, or misattribute citations or source links returned with grounded Outputs.
• Represent that a statement is supported by a source when you have reason to know it is not.
• Pass grounded Outputs to end users in a way that hides that they are AI-generated, where a reasonable user would be misled.
• Fail to tell users that they are interacting with an AI system in a chatbot or other conversational interface, unless that is obvious from the context.
• Remove, obscure, or alter watermarks, metadata, or other provenance signals that identify content as AI-generated.

7. High-Stakes & Automated Decisions

You must not rely solely on Outputs for decisions with legal, medical, financial, employment, housing, credit, or safety consequences for a person. Such uses require meaningful review by a qualified person with authority to change the result before the decision takes effect or the Output is provided to the affected person, and compliance with applicable law. You are responsible for telling your end users when Outputs are AI-generated and may contain errors.

You must not use the Services for any practice prohibited under the EU AI Act (Regulation (EU) 2024/1689) or similar laws, including social scoring, biometric categorization based on sensitive characteristics, emotion recognition in the workplace or in education, untargeted scraping of facial images, or predictive policing based solely on profiling. If you use the Services as part of a high-risk AI system under applicable law, you are responsible for meeting the obligations that apply to that system.

8. Prompts, Context & Retrieval Integrity

You must not:

• Submit content you do not have the right to process, including confidential third-party material, as prompts or grounding context.
• Use the Services to extract system prompts, model weights, training data, or other non-public information about the Inference Services.
• Use Outputs to train, fine-tune, or distill a competing model, or to build a competing search index, without written authorization.
• Deliberately plant, seed, or manipulate web content or grounding sources to cause the Services to return false, harmful, or misleading Outputs.
• Treat instructions embedded in retrieved web content as trusted. You must implement reasonable safeguards against indirect prompt injection when your application lets the model act on retrieved content (for example, by calling tools or sending messages).

Additional Requirements: Search Content & Rate Limits

9. Use of Search Content

These rules apply to the Search API and to any Search Content or the Inference Services used for Grounding or otherwise.

• Do not copy or store for re-use significant portions of Search Content without contractual authorization.
• Do not republish, resell, or redistribute Search Content as a standalone dataset, feed, or index.
• Do not use Search Content to train or fine-tune models without written authorization.
• Respect the rights of the original publishers. Search Content may be subject to third-party intellectual property rights, and source links and attribution returned with it must be kept where the Services provide them.

10. Rate Limits & Resource Use

Excessive API calls that degrade service quality for other users constitute abuse regardless of intent. This applies to Search API requests and Inference Services requests alike, including long-running or very large generation requests. Implement exponential back-off and caching in your integration. Repeatedly ignoring 429 responses may result in suspension of Services or termination as Customer.

Enforcement

You.com reserves the right to:

• Suspend or terminate access to the Search API, the Inference Services, or both, immediately upon detection of a material or chronic policy violation.
• Rate-limit or throttle integrations that generate unusual or potentially harmful traffic patterns.
• Filter, block, or withhold Outputs, or require changes to your safeguards, where needed to prevent harm.
• Report violations to relevant authorities where legally required.
• Request information reasonably necessary to verify your compliance with this AUP, including a description of your use case, your safeguards, and the terms you impose on End Users. You must respond to such requests promptly and accurately.
• Terminate any user suspected of violation of this AUP or for failure to make payment on services use as agreed.

Exceptions. You.com may, in its discretion and in writing, permit a use that this AUP would otherwise restrict for legitimate research, security, educational, or public-interest purposes, subject to any additional safeguards You.com requires.

Reporting Violations

If you discover a vulnerability, material misuse pattern, or significant AUP violation in your own integration or another's, including harmful, unsafe, or clearly ungrounded Outputs from the Inference Services, please report it to: [email protected]. Responsible disclosure of security issues will not be treated as a policy violation. If you specifically wish to disclose a found security issue, please email [email protected], or for a privacy issue email [email protected].

Security testing of the Services, including red-teaming, prompt-injection, and jailbreak testing, requires prior written approval from [email protected]. Testing conducted within an approved scope and reported promptly will not be treated as a violation of this AUP.