Legal

Terms of Service

Last updated: September 2026 · Signal vs Noise Strategic Consulting

1. Acceptance

By accessing or using the AAEO platform at aaeo.trishablack.com, you agree to be bound by these Terms. If you do not agree, do not use the Platform. Access is granted through a signed consulting or platform agreement with Signal vs Noise Strategic Consulting, or through an active self-serve subscription purchased on the Platform. Signal vs Noise may update these Terms from time to time; the version posted here governs your use, and continued use of the Platform after an update constitutes acceptance of the updated Terms.

2. Authorized Use Only

The Platform is a proprietary tool owned by Trisha Black / Signal vs Noise Strategic Consulting. Your access is personal and non-transferable. You may not share your login credentials, allow others to access the Platform through your account, or use the Platform on behalf of any third party without written permission.

3. Intellectual Property

All software, designs, methodologies, workflows, query frameworks and taxonomies, scoring rubrics, signal definitions and weightings, market-attention estimation methods, analyst datasets, and analytical outputs (including Intelligence Briefs and scan data) are the exclusive intellectual property of Signal vs Noise Strategic Consulting. Nothing in these Terms — and nothing you create using Platform outputs — transfers any ownership interest to you, creates joint authorship, or constitutes work made for hire. You may not copy, reproduce, reverse-engineer, or create derivative works from any part of the Platform, and screenshots, recordings, or other reproductions of the Platform interface may not be used to replicate or build competing products.

4. Trade Secrets and Methodology

The Platform's methodologies — including how queries are designed, prioritized, and scored; how signals are defined, weighted, and combined; and how market-attention estimates are computed — are trade secrets of Signal vs Noise Strategic Consulting. Public descriptions of the Platform, including the category education published in our open documentation, describe what the Platform draws on; they do not disclose, license, or waive protection over any implementation, parameter, weighting, or process. Using the Platform does not disclose these trade secrets to you, and you agree not to probe, test, systematically compare, or analyze Platform behavior for the purpose of deriving them. These obligations survive termination of your access indefinitely, and you acknowledge that unauthorized use or disclosure would cause irreparable harm for which injunctive relief is appropriate.

5. Licensing and Access Grants

Access to the Platform is licensed, never sold. Signal vs Noise grants you a limited, revocable, non-exclusive, non-transferable, non-sublicensable license to use the Platform and its outputs for your own internal business purposes, under one of three arrangements: (a) a self-serve subscription purchased on the Platform, governed by these Terms and the plan limits on the Pricing page; (b) a managed engagement under a signed consulting agreement; or (c) an agency or multi-client license for firms serving clients on the Platform's behalf, available only under a separate written addendum executed with Signal vs Noise. No arrangement transfers ownership, source code, methodology, or any intellectual-property right described in Sections 3 and 4; each grants only the right to use the Platform as delivered. Agency and multi-client use without an executed addendum is not permitted.

6. Confidentiality of Reports

Intelligence Briefs, scan results, and any data generated by the Platform are confidential and provided solely for your internal use. You may not resell, redistribute, or publicly share these outputs without written consent from Signal vs Noise Strategic Consulting. You may not remove, obscure, crop, or alter the proprietary notices, watermarks, or attribution carried on any Platform output, and any permitted excerpt or reformatted use must preserve them.

7. Prohibited Activities

You may not: (a) use the Platform, its outputs, or knowledge gained through access to build or assist in building a competing product or service; (b) scrape, crawl, or systematically extract data from the Platform; (c) attempt to circumvent access controls or security measures; (d) input, upload, or otherwise provide Platform content or outputs to any artificial-intelligence or machine-learning system, or use them to train, fine-tune, ground, or improve any model, index, or retrieval system, without prior written consent; (e) aggregate, compile, or pool Platform outputs across accounts, clients, or time into any dataset, benchmark, index, or ranking of your own; (f) use the Platform in a manner that could damage its reputation or that of Signal vs Noise Strategic Consulting.

8. API Costs and Fair Use

The Platform makes calls to third-party AI APIs (Anthropic, OpenAI, Perplexity, Google) on your behalf. Authorized users agree to reasonable use — scans should be run for legitimate business analysis, not for testing, abuse, or resale. Signal vs Noise reserves the right to revoke access for excessive or abusive usage.

9. Platform Scope — Not a RAG System

The Platform is an AI-visibility intelligence tool: it submits buyer-intent queries to public AI answer engines, records and analyzes how those engines describe companies, and correlates changes with analyst-relations activity. The Platform is NOT a retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) system. It does not ingest, index, embed, or retrieve from your documents or private data, does not build knowledge bases, and does not generate answers grounded in customer-provided content. Any future RAG capability will be announced separately, offered under its own terms, and is not included in — or promised by — any current subscription or engagement. Purchases made today are for the visibility-intelligence capabilities described in this section only.

10. Subscriptions and Billing

Self-serve plans are billed monthly in advance via Stripe. Plan limits (such as the number of companies tracked) apply as described on the Pricing page. You may cancel anytime through the billing portal; access continues until the end of the paid period, after which no refunds are issued for partial months. Signal vs Noise may change plan pricing or features with 30 days' notice to active subscribers.

11. Open Documentation and Transparency

Signal vs Noise publishes the category education behind AAEO as open documentation in a public repository at github.com/trishab/aaeo-docs, licensed under Creative Commons BY-ND 4.0. We do this on purpose: the ideas an analyst-relations team needs to make good decisions should be openly accessible, and — unlike gated research — every revision to that documentation is tracked in public version history, so anyone can see exactly what changed and when, the way an open reference work keeps a visible edit history. This transparency extends only to the published documentation; it does not disclose, license, or waive protection over the Platform's proprietary software, methodology, or trade secrets described in Sections 3 and 4, which are deliberately not published. The documentation is provided for information only and does not form part of, or modify, these Terms or any agreement with Signal vs Noise.

12. No Warranty

The Platform is provided 'as is.' AI-generated scores, positions, and sentiment classifications are estimates based on model outputs at the time of the scan. Signal vs Noise does not guarantee the accuracy of any AI answer engine's response or the completeness of any scan result.

13. Termination and Survival

Signal vs Noise reserves the right to terminate or suspend access at any time, with or without notice, for violation of these Terms or for any other reason at its sole discretion. Sections 3 (Intellectual Property), 4 (Trade Secrets and Methodology), 5 (Licensing and Access Grants), 6 (Confidentiality of Reports), 7 (Prohibited Activities), 12 (No Warranty), and 14 (Governing Law) survive any termination of access or subscription.

14. Governing Law

These Terms are governed by the laws of the State of Colorado, United States. Any disputes shall be resolved in the courts of Denver, Colorado.

15. Contact

Questions about these Terms: info@trishablack.com