Acceptable Use Policy (AUP) — Searchbase

Last updated: 2026-05-08 Effective: 2026-05-12

This Acceptable Use Policy (the "AUP") sets out the rules you must follow when using Searchbase. The AUP is incorporated into the Terms of Service. Violating the AUP is a material breach of the Terms and may result in immediate suspension or termination of your account, with no refund.

If a use case is not explicitly forbidden here, you are still bound by applicable law and the Terms; this AUP is a non-exhaustive list of obvious red lines.

1. Searchbase is for lawful research and data extraction

Searchbase is a web-research and scraping tool. It is suitable for: market research, competitive intelligence on public information, lead enrichment from data sources you are entitled to use, content discovery, public-record analysis.

Searchbase is not a stalking tool, a doxxing tool, an unauthorized-access tool, an ad-fraud tool, or a content-moderation-evasion tool.

2. Data-protection red lines (GDPR)

You must not use Searchbase to:

2.1 Process personal data without a lawful basis

Scraping or extracting personal data of identified or identifiable individuals without a valid Art. 6 GDPR lawful basis (your consent, contract, legal obligation, vital interest, public task, or legitimate interest properly balanced) is forbidden. The fact that data is publicly accessible does not make every processing lawful.

2.2 Target special categories of data (Art. 9 GDPR)

Do not aim Searchbase at content whose primary purpose is to reveal:

  • racial or ethnic origin;
  • political opinions;
  • religious or philosophical beliefs;
  • trade-union membership;
  • genetic or biometric data used for unique identification;
  • health data;
  • data concerning a person's sex life or sexual orientation.

2.3 Target criminal-conviction data (Art. 10 GDPR)

Do not use Searchbase to compile, enrich or correlate data concerning criminal convictions and offences, except under the strict conditions of Art. 10 GDPR (which generally requires a public-authority context or specific national-law authorization).

2.4 Target minors

Do not collect, infer or correlate personal data on individuals you have reason to believe are under the age of consent (Art. 8 GDPR; in Italy, 14 years), without verifiable parental consent.

2.5 Use the Service to harm a data subject

Do not use Searchbase to identify, track, harass, intimidate, defame, or otherwise harm a specific person. This includes building dossiers, deanonymizing pseudonymous accounts, locating individuals against their will, or aiding non-consensual intimate imagery research.

3. Source-website rules

When you point Searchbase at a third-party website or API, you are responsible for compliance with that source. In particular:

  • Respect the source's Terms of Service and robots.txt directives.
  • Do not bypass paywalls, login walls, captchas, IP blocks or other access controls put in place by the source. Searchbase's anti-bot capabilities are intended to handle ordinary scraping, not to circumvent active access-control measures (Computer Misuse Act analogues, EU Directive 2013/40/EU on attacks against information systems).
  • Do not access content that requires authentication unless you are authorized to do so and you have authority to feed those credentials to a third-party tool.
  • Do not extract data from a source whose licence or contract forbids machine processing (most academic/research databases, paid newswires, sui-generis-protected databases under EU Directive 96/9/EC).

4. Volume, rate and infrastructure abuse

You must not:

  • intentionally exceed the per-user rate limits or credit caps documented in the Terms and the in-app usage page;
  • run automated workflows designed to amplify cost or denial-of-service the Service or its sub-processors;
  • use multiple accounts to circumvent free-tier limits or bans (multi-accounting);
  • attempt to reverse-engineer, probe, scan or load-test the Searchbase infrastructure beyond the rate budget you've been allocated;
  • generate traffic patterns that materially increase our cost without commensurate use (e.g., abusive Deep Research loops on free accounts).

We monitor for these patterns and will throttle, block or terminate accounts as needed to protect the Service.

5. Output use — content rules

You must not use Searchbase output to:

  • generate or distribute spam, phishing, harassment, threats, hate speech, or material that incites violence;
  • impersonate another person or entity, or build content designed to deceive about its origin (deepfakes, fake reviews, astroturfing);
  • generate malware, exploits, or instructions to facilitate unauthorized access to systems;
  • produce CSAM (child sexual-abuse material), non-consensual intimate imagery, or content that sexualizes minors;
  • build or train AI models that compete with Searchbase, or republish substantial portions of Searchbase's UI, prompts, or aggregated outputs as your own product.

6. Sub-processor policies

Your use of Searchbase passes through third-party AI providers (Anthropic, Microsoft Azure OpenAI, DeepSeek, Deepgram and others — see Privacy Policy § 4). You agree that your use must also comply with their usage policies, in particular:

A use case allowed by these Terms but forbidden by a sub-processor's policy is still forbidden — we cannot serve it.

7. Reporting and enforcement

If you become aware of a violation of this AUP — by yourself, your team, or a third party using Searchbase against you — report it to [email protected]. Where the violation involves personal data, also notify [email protected].

We may, at our discretion and proportionate to the breach:

  • ask you to remove or stop the offending workflow;
  • impose temporary rate or feature limits;
  • suspend or terminate the account;
  • preserve and disclose evidence to a competent authority where legally required.

We will give notice and an opportunity to remedy where reasonable, except in cases of (a) imminent harm to users or third parties, (b) ongoing violation of mandatory law, or (c) a sub-processor demanding immediate action.

8. Changes

We may update this AUP. The current version is at https://searchbase.org/aup. For material changes we will give at least 15 days' notice via email and/or in-app banner.

9. Contact