Acceptable Use Policy

Effective June 29, 2026 · Version 1.0.0

This Acceptable Use Policy ("AUP") applies to everyone who uses vetsnear.me, including unauthenticated visitors and account holders. It is incorporated by reference into our Terms of Use.

1. Prohibited content

You must not submit, post, or transmit content that:

• Is unlawful, fraudulent, defamatory, obscene, harassing, or threatening
• Infringes intellectual property rights (see our DMCA Policy)
• Contains malware, viruses, or other malicious code
• Impersonates another person or business
• Misrepresents your affiliation with a business listing
• Reveals another person's private information without consent
• Promotes illegal activity, violence, or self-harm

1.1 Pet-specific prohibitions

The Service is a pet-related platform. You additionally must not submit content or service offers that:

• Promote, depict, glorify, or facilitate animal cruelty, neglect, abandonment, or fighting
• Offer services that are unsafe, unlicensed where licensure is required, or outside your qualifications
• Promote illegal animal breeding, sales, transport, or trafficking; or sales of regulated species without lawful authorization
• Misrepresent veterinary, medical, or therapeutic claims about a product or service
• Offer or solicit unsupervised access to a residence with animals present, except through service categories built for that purpose (e.g., house sitting, drop-in visits) with appropriate safeguards
• Misrepresent vaccination, certification, licensing, insurance, or background-check status

2. Prohibited conduct

You must not:

• Use automated tools (bots, scrapers, crawlers) to access the site, except for well-behaved search engines following robots.txt
• Bypass, disable, or interfere with security or rate-limiting features
• Reverse engineer or attempt to extract our source code
• Use the Service to send unsolicited commercial communication (spam)
• Submit fraudulent business-listing claims or fake verification evidence
• Submit fake reviews, ratings, photos, or other inauthentic User Content
• Use the Service to harvest user contact information for any purpose
• Interfere with another user's use of the Service

3. Business listing claims

If you claim a business listing, you represent that you have authority to act on that business's behalf. False claims are grounds for immediate account termination, removal of all edits you made, and potential legal action.

4. Reviews and User Content

Reviews and User Content must reflect your honest, first-hand experience. The Federal Trade Commission's Rule on the Use of Consumer Reviews and Testimonials (effective October 21, 2024) and equivalent state consumer-protection laws apply.

Prohibited review conduct:

• Fabricated or inauthentic reviews. You may not post a review of a business, product, or service you have not personally used.
• Compensated reviews without disclosure. You may not post a review in exchange for payment, gift cards, discounts, free services, or other incentives without clearly and conspicuously disclosing that fact in the review.
• Insider reviews without disclosure. Owners, employees, family members, friends, agents, and others with a material connection to a business must clearly disclose that connection in any review of that business.
• AI-fabricated reviews. AI tools may be used to assist drafting, but you may not use AI to fabricate or materially distort an experience you did not have. The review must reflect your real experience.
• Review gating. Businesses may not solicit reviews only from customers likely to leave positive reviews while excluding others.
• Suppression of negative reviews. Businesses may not flag honest negative reviews as inauthentic, threaten reviewers, or otherwise suppress lawful criticism.
• Fake reporting abuse. Reporting authentic reviews as inauthentic, or filing volume reports to harass a reviewer or business, is itself a violation.

Moderation. We may remove, edit, hide, or annotate content that violates this policy. We do not moderate reviews on the basis of their valence (positive or negative); a negative but honest review will not be removed simply because the business objects to it.

Appeals. If your content has been removed or your account suspended, you may appeal by emailing legal@vetsnear.me with the relevant context within 30 days of the action. We will review in good faith and respond within a reasonable time.

5. Enforcement

We may, at our sole discretion and without notice:

• Remove or modify any content that violates this AUP
• Suspend or terminate your account
• Report violations to law enforcement
• Cooperate with subpoenas and other valid legal process

Repeat violators will be permanently banned, including by IP block where appropriate.

6. Reporting violations

Report violations to legal@vetsnear.me. We investigate every report and respond within a reasonable time. For copyright complaints specifically, see our DMCA Policy.

7. Changes

We may update this AUP at any time without re-consent — new prohibitions take effect on posting. Material expansions of prohibited conduct will be announced via the changelog at the top of this page.