Ethics

Client confidentiality

Scan data, prompt sets, competitive analyses, and recommendations produced for a client belong to that client. We do not share or sell this data. We do not use one client's data to inform another client's project without explicit consent from the originating client.

Aggregated, anonymised observations — for example, "across 20 UK pension brands we sampled, 12 had zero ChatGPT brand presence" — may appear in editorial content. Individual brands are never named in those aggregates without permission.

Conflicts of interest

When we write about a brand publicly:

• If the brand is a current or former SearchIntel client, we disclose that in the piece.
• If the brand is a direct competitor to a SearchIntel client in a category where we have active commercial work, we either decline to cover them publicly or disclose the conflict.
• We do not accept payment, equity, or in-kind compensation in exchange for editorial coverage.

Public scan data

SearchIntel's free /check tool and any public visibility benchmarks rely on data we collect via the official AI platform APIs and through SerpAPI. We do not scrape behind authentication, bypass rate limits, or access platforms in ways the platform's terms of service prohibit.

If a brand whose public scan data appears in our editorial content objects to the inclusion, we will discuss the objection and, where the data is genuinely inaccurate or misleading, remove or correct it.

What we will not do

• Promise specific score improvements in specific timeframes (we cannot control AI platform behaviour)
• Use undisclosed paid tactics to manipulate AI citations (e.g. buying placements on third-party sites without disclosure)
• Fabricate reviews, testimonials, or social proof
• Misrepresent affiliations with platforms we don't represent (we are not affiliated with Google, OpenAI, Anthropic, or any of the AI platforms we measure)
• Encourage clients to engage in behaviour that would violate AI platform terms of service
• Publish reactive teardowns of brands motivated by something other than the publicly observable AI evidence

Accountability

SearchIntel is a small agency operated by Paul Byrne. There is no editorial board. When something goes wrong — a mistake in published content, a complaint from a measured brand, a methodology question — Paul personally handles it.

Contact for ethics concerns, corrections, or feedback: paul@searchintel.tech. We aim to acknowledge within one working day and to ship any agreed correction within five.

Platform disclosure

SearchIntel is an agency, not a platform. We use proprietary tooling internally to run scans and analyse data, but we do not sell software access as our primary product. Where this distinction matters — for example, when readers compare SearchIntel to monitoring-tool vendors like Profound or Peec — we make the distinction explicit in our marketing copy and call-to-action language. See About for the longer agency-vs-platform framing.