Website Terms of Service & Privacy Policy

Effective Date: September 4, 2026

Welcome to start.berean.llc (the "Website"), operated by Berean Trustbuilt Tech, a web services brand of Berean, LLC, a California limited liability company ("Berean," "we," "us," or "our").

This document is a binding agreement that governs your use of our Website and services. It is divided into three parts:

• Part A: Website Terms of Service
• Part B: Privacy Policy
• Part C: Supplemental CCPA Privacy Notice

By using this Website, you agree to these terms in full.

PART A — WEBSITE TERMS OF SERVICE

1. Acceptance of Terms

By accessing or using our Website, including submitting a request for our Website Evaluation, you agree to be bound by these Terms of Service and our Privacy Policy (Part B). If you do not agree to all of these terms, you must not use this Website.

For our terms to be legally enforceable under California law, you must be given "reasonably conspicuous notice" of the terms and provide an "unambiguous manifestation of assent." For this reason, we require an affirmative action, such as checking a box or clicking a button that explicitly states your agreement, before you submit any personal information or purchase services.

2. Description of Services

We offer the following services, which are described in more detail on the Website:

(a) "The Website Evaluation": A paid ($199, one-time) automated, read-only evaluation of a prospect's public website. It produces a graded report across eight areas: speed, design, sales flow, SEO, security, ADA accessibility, legal pages, and "AI Search Readiness." The $199 fee is waived when the client starts any monthly subscription (the AI Visibility plan begins with a six (6) month initial run).

• Read-Only: The audit only reads publicly available information, just as any site visitor or search engine would. It never logs into your site, probes for vulnerabilities, or performs penetration tests.
• Data Sources: Speed and accessibility data are sourced from Google's public PageSpeed/Lighthouse API.
• Verification: Reports include a tamper-evident verification code (a hash of the scores).
• Fee: $199, one time. Included at no charge when the client starts any monthly subscription.

(b) "AI Visibility" Subscription: A recurring monthly service (~$9.99/month; term-length discounts may apply). It includes: (i) installing and maintaining a "living AI layer" (schema.org structured data, FAQ block, llms.txt file, and crawler permissions) on your website and keeping it current; (ii) monitoring and reporting on AI-related crawler activity on your site; and (iii) sending a monthly plain-English report. This service is offered month-to-month and on optional fixed terms of six (6), twelve (12), or twenty-four (24) months. Longer terms receive a reduced monthly rate and a waived evaluation fee. Month-to-month subscriptions may be canceled at any time; fixed-term subscriptions run for the term selected at signup.

(c) "AI Growth" Subscription: A recurring monthly service (~$39.99/month). It includes all services from the "AI Visibility" subscription, plus a monthly "AI mystery shopper" analysis and ongoing optimization work.

(d) One-Time Fix Packages: Discrete, one-time projects (~$199–$899) to repair a client's existing website. Services include ADA/accessibility fixes, legal page packs (Privacy Policy, Terms, etc.), speed optimization, security hardening, and a one-time "AI-Ready Tune-Up."

(e) "Website + AI, All-In": A comprehensive subscription service (~$125/month plus a one-time $199 setup) that includes building a custom website of approximately five pages, plus ongoing hosting, security, maintenance, monitoring, monthly reporting, and a limited number of monthly content updates. A non-refundable startup fee of approximately $100 applies. This is an ongoing service, not a purchase of code.

Pricing; Month-to-Month Billing: All prices are listed publicly on start.berean.llc and are subject to change; changes apply prospectively to future billing cycles. Subscriptions are billed monthly. The AI Visibility plan begins with a six (6) month initial run; all other plans — and AI Visibility after its initial run — are month to month with no minimum term. A client may cancel any month-to-month service at any time by email, effective at the end of the then-current billing month, with no cancellation fee. Minor content changes to a client's site are included at no charge. Work beyond minor changes is quoted as a fixed price in writing and performed only after the client approves that quote; we do not bill by the hour. Where a requested project would materially increase the ongoing cost of maintaining or securing a client's site, any resulting change to the monthly rate is stated in the same written quote, before the client accepts. Alternative and seasonal pricing arrangements may be agreed in writing to fit a client's business model.

3. No-Guarantee Disclaimer

We measure, we don't promise. Our services are designed to identify and fix technical issues that provably block search engines and AI assistants from reading and understanding your website. We then provide monthly reports on the observed results.

We NEVER guarantee any specific business outcomes, including but not limited to:

• Recommendations or favorable mentions by any AI assistant.
• Improvements in search engine rankings.
• The number of citations or mentions your business receives.
• Any increase in lead volume, customer traffic, or revenue.

The digital landscape is complex and constantly changing. If you are unsatisfied with the observed results, you can cancel your subscription at any time.

Reported referral counts from AI assistants are described as minimums ("at least..."). This is because some AI applications may strip or obscure referrer information, making a complete count impossible. Our audit reports state facts derived from public data and identify their sources (e.g., Google Lighthouse, the AI's own responses).

4. Website Evaluation — Terms

The Website Evaluation is a paid service ($199, one time), and it is included at no charge when you begin any monthly subscription. The reports are generated using automated tools and publicly available data. While we strive for accuracy, we make no warranty that the report is complete, error-free, or fit for any particular purpose. Reports are retained by us as business records.

5. Intellectual Property

All content on start.berean.llc, including our branding, text, graphics, and logos, is our exclusive property. Furthermore, our proprietary systems, report formats, code, software, tools, and templates developed to provide our services are the intellectual property of Berean. You may not copy, modify, redistribute, reverse-engineer, or create derivative works from our proprietary systems or materials without our express written consent.

5A. Ownership of Work Product; What Happens If You Cancel

Our subscription services are a license to use, not a sale. Pricing is set on that basis.

What is and remains yours. Your domain name; your business name, logo, trademarks, and brand assets; the text, photographs, video, and other content you supply or that we create at your direction from your materials; your customer, lead, and contact data; and any third-party accounts registered in your name (for example your Google Business Profile). We claim no ownership of any of it, and on request we will provide your content and your collected lead data in a common file format.

What is and remains ours. The website code, templates, layouts, components, configuration, and design system we build; the structured-data/AI-readability layer and the systems that maintain it; our tracking snippet, plugin, dashboards, report formats, and audit methodology; and any hosting, monitoring, or automation infrastructure we operate. These are licensed to you for the term of your subscription only.

On cancellation or non-payment. Your license to the items above ends when the subscription ends. We may deactivate the website, the AI layer, the tracking, and the reporting. You keep everything in the "yours" list, and we will cooperate in transferring your domain and delivering your content and lead data. You may not copy, export, re-host, decompile, or reuse our code, templates, or systems after the subscription ends.

If you want to own it outright. A perpetual license or full assignment of the code we wrote is available as a separate paid buy-out. Ask us and we will quote it in writing. Nothing here prevents you from having your own developer build you a new site from scratch.

6. User Conduct

You agree to use our Website only for lawful purposes. You agree not to:

• Submit false, inaccurate, or misleading information through our lead-generation form or to our staff.
• Use automated tools (e.g., scrapers, bots) to access, copy, or overload our Website or its systems.
• Attempt to gain unauthorized access to any non-public areas of our Website or our database.
• Use the Website for any fraudulent or illegal activity.

To protect our systems, our lead form is monitored with rate limiting and an anti-bot honeypot.

7. Third-Party Services

Our Website Evaluation relies on data provided by Google's PageSpeed/Lighthouse API. Our other services may integrate with or rely on other third-party services (e.g., AI provider APIs). We are not responsible for the availability, accuracy, or performance of any third-party services. Their terms and privacy policies will govern their services, not ours.

7A. Service Availability, Downtime, and Interruptions

No uptime guarantee. We do not promise that any website, hosting, tracking, reporting, or other service will be available continuously, uninterrupted, error-free, or accessible at any particular time. Our services are provided on an "as is" and "as available" basis. We offer no service level agreement (SLA), uptime percentage commitment, availability credit, or downtime refund, and none should be inferred from any statement on our website, in a proposal, in a report, or in conversation.

We depend on third parties, and so does your site. Websites and services we provide run on infrastructure operated by companies we do not control — including but not limited to hosting and content delivery providers, domain registrars, DNS providers, certificate authorities, payment processors, email providers, database and storage providers, analytics providers, search engines, and AI providers. An outage, suspension, rate limit, price change, policy change, security incident, deprecation, or discontinuation at any of those providers may make your website or any service slow, degraded, or entirely unavailable. We are not responsible or liable for any such interruption, and interruptions of this kind are not a breach of any agreement with us.

Not responsible for lost revenue or business. Without limiting Section 8, we are not liable for lost sales, lost profits, lost revenue, lost customers, lost leads, lost bookings, lost data, lost rankings, lost search or AI visibility, reputational harm, or any other business loss arising from or related to downtime, slowness, errors, interruption, degraded performance, data loss, or the unavailability of any website or service — regardless of cause and regardless of whether we were advised such losses were possible.

Monitoring is not prevention. We may monitor sites and services and may notify you of problems we detect. Monitoring is a courtesy and a diagnostic aid — it is not a guarantee that we will detect any particular problem, detect it promptly, prevent it, or resolve it within any timeframe. A missed, delayed, failed, or inaccurate alert creates no liability.

Maintenance and changes. We may perform maintenance, updates, migrations, security patches, and configuration changes, which may cause brief interruptions, and we may do so without advance notice when we judge it necessary for security or stability.

Restoration, not perfection. Where a site we host becomes unavailable due to something within our control, our sole obligation — and your sole and exclusive remedy — is to use commercially reasonable efforts to restore service within a reasonable time. We do not warrant any specific restoration time.

Your responsibilities. You are responsible for keeping your domain registration current and paid, for the accuracy and legality of content you supply, for the security of credentials and accounts in your name, for keeping your payment method current, and for maintaining your own copies of any content, media, or business data you would not want to lose. A lapsed domain, a chargeback, a suspended third-party account, a client-directed change, or content you supplied is not our responsibility.

Force majeure. We are not liable for any delay or failure to perform caused by events beyond our reasonable control, including acts of God, natural disaster, fire, flood, power or internet failure, telecommunications failure, provider outage, cyberattack, denial-of-service attack, malicious code, labor dispute, war, terrorism, civil unrest, epidemic, government action, or changes in law.

Suspension for non-payment. We may suspend or deactivate services for non-payment as described in the billing terms, and any resulting unavailability is not downtime for which we bear responsibility.

8. Limitation of Liability

TO THE MAXIMUM EXTENT PERMITTED BY CALIFORNIA LAW, BEREAN AND ITS OWNER(S), EMPLOYEES, AND AFFILIATES SHALL NOT BE LIABLE FOR ANY INDIRECT, INCIDENTAL, CONSEQUENTIAL, SPECIAL, OR PUNITIVE DAMAGES, OR FOR ANY LOSS OF PROFITS, DATA, OR REVENUE, ARISING OUT OF OR RELATED TO YOUR USE OF OUR WEBSITE OR SERVICES.

OUR TOTAL AGGREGATE LIABILITY ARISING FROM OR RELATED TO THE WEBSITE OR OUR SERVICES SHALL NOT EXCEED THE GREATER OF (A) THE TOTAL AMOUNT YOU PAID TO US IN THE TWELVE (12) MONTHS PRECEDING THE EVENT GIVING RISE TO THE CLAIM, OR (B) FIFTY DOLLARS ($50.00).

This limitation of liability applies to claims based on breach of contract and ordinary negligence. Consistent with California Civil Code § 1668, this limitation does not apply to and will not limit our liability for claims arising from our own fraud, willful misconduct, willful injury, or violation of law.

9. Indemnification

You agree to indemnify, defend, and hold harmless Berean, its owner(s), employees, and affiliates from and against any and all third-party claims, liabilities, damages, and costs (including reasonable attorneys' fees) arising from your misuse of the Website, your submission of false or infringing information, or your violation of these Terms.

10. Modifications to Terms

We reserve the right to modify these Terms at any time. We will post the revised Terms on this page and update the "Effective Date" at the top. Your continued use of the Website after any such changes constitutes your acceptance of the new Terms.

11. Governing Law and Venue

These Terms are governed by the laws of the State of California, without regard to its conflict of law principles. The exclusive venue for any legal dispute arising from or related to these Terms or our services shall be the state and federal courts located in Sacramento County, California.

Dispute Resolution: Any dispute arising from these Terms shall be resolved through binding arbitration administered by a neutral arbitrator in Sacramento County, California, rather than in court. You agree to waive your right to participate in a class action lawsuit or class-wide arbitration. This arbitration clause does not prevent you from bringing issues to the attention of federal, state, or local agencies, nor does it prevent you from seeking relief in a small claims court. You may opt out of this arbitration agreement by sending a written notice to us at the contact address below within thirty (30) days of first accepting these Terms.

Severability: If any provision of these Terms is found to be unenforceable or invalid, that provision will be limited or eliminated to the minimum extent necessary so that the Terms will otherwise remain in full force and effect.

12. Contact Information

For any questions about these Terms, please contact us:

Berean Trustbuilt Tech team@berean.llc 8863 Greenback Ln, Ste 230, Orangevale, CA 95662

PART B — PRIVACY POLICY

13. Effective Date

August 16, 2026

14. Introduction

Berean Trustbuilt Tech ("we," "us," "our") operates the website start.berean.llc. This Privacy Policy describes how we collect, use, and protect the personal information of our website visitors, prospects, and clients. We are committed to protecting your privacy and complying with applicable data privacy laws, including the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) as amended by the California Privacy Rights Act (CPRA).

15. Information We Collect

We collect the following types of information:

(a) Information You Voluntarily Provide: When you request a Website Evaluation, you voluntarily provide us with your name, business name, website URL, contact information (email and/or phone number), and any optional message you include.

(b) Client Account Information: If you become a paying client, we collect the necessary contact and account information to provide our services and manage billing.

(c) Tracking Technology Data: As described in detail below, we collect limited, non-personal data about automated bots and certain human visitors on our clients' websites to provide our monitoring services. We do not use this technology on start.berean.llc.

We deliberately do not collect sensitive personal information, IP addresses (retained), browsing history across different websites, precise geolocation, biometric data, or any personal information from individuals we know to be under the age of 18.

16. Our Tracking Technology (For Client Websites Only)

Our "AI Visibility" and "AI Growth" subscription services rely on a unique, privacy-focused tracking technology that we install on our clients' websites with their explicit authorization. We deliberately do not track ordinary website traffic and are not a replacement for traditional analytics services.

Our tracking has two parts:

(a) Server-Side Bot Tracking: Our proprietary WordPress plugin or a server-side hook records activity from automated software agents (bots) only. When a known AI crawler (e.g., GPTBot, PerplexityBot, ClaudeBot, Google-Extended) or a traditional search engine crawler (e.g., Googlebot, Bingbot) visits a client's site, we log only the following:

• The client's site identifier.
• The bot's user-agent string (its self-declared name).
• The URL path it requested.
• A timestamp.
• No personal information is involved, as bots are software, not people.

(b) Browser-Side AI Referral Tracking: A small browser snippet fires only when a human visitor arrives on a client's website directly from a known AI assistant's domain (e.g., chatgpt.com, perplexity.ai). It records only the following:

• The client's site identifier.
• The referring AI domain.
• The landing page path.
• A timestamp.
• This snippet sets no cookies, does no browser fingerprinting, and collects no personal information. We do not retain the visitor's IP address, name, or any other personal identifiers.

Important Default Behavior: If a visitor arrives on a client's website from any other source (e.g., a direct visit, a Google search, a social media link), our tracking snippet does not fire. Nothing is transmitted or stored about them.

Data Storage and Use: This limited, aggregated data is stored in our secure database (hosted by Supabase/PostgreSQL in the US) and used exclusively to generate performance dashboards and monthly reports for our clients.

17. How We Use Information

We use the information we collect for the following specific business purposes:

• Lead Form Data: To generate and deliver the Website Evaluation report you requested and to follow up with you by email or phone about our services.
• Client Account Data: To perform the services you have contracted with us, manage your subscription, process payments, and send monthly reports and other transactional communications.
• Tracking Data (from client sites): To provide our AI visibility monitoring and reporting services to our subscribed clients, showing them how AI and search crawlers interact with their sites.

We do not use your personal information for targeted advertising or what the CCPA calls "cross-context behavioral advertising."

18. Categories of Personal Information We Collect (CCPA Disclosure)

Under the CCPA, we are required to disclose the categories of personal information we collect and the business purposes for which we use it. In the last 12 months, we have collected the following categories of personal information about California residents:

• (a) Identifiers: Such as a real name, email address, and phone number. We collect this from our lead form and when you become a client.
• (b) Internet or Other Electronic Network Activity Information: This is limited to the referring AI domain and landing path for visitors arriving on our clients' websites from AI assistants, as described in Section 16. We do not collect this on start.berean.llc.

We collect this information for the following business purposes: providing our services, communicating with clients and prospects, and maintaining our business records.

19. No Sale or Sharing of Personal Information

We do not sell your personal information, and we do not "share" it for cross-context behavioral advertising. We have not sold or shared any personal information in the preceding 12 months.

What runs on start.berean.llc. This site sets no advertising trackers and no analytics cookies. It does not load Google Analytics, Google Ads, Meta/Facebook pixels, or any advertising network. The only cookie this site sets is the strictly necessary session cookie for the site owner's own administrative login.

Two measurement tools do run, and neither uses a cookie or builds a profile of you:

• Vercel Web Analytics (our hosting provider) counts page views. It records the page URL, the referring site, and a coarse country, device type, and browser. It does not set a cookie, does not assign you a persistent identifier, and cannot follow you to any other website.
• Our own AI referral snippet — the same product we sell — runs only when a visitor arrives here from a known AI assistant. It records which AI sent them and which page they landed on. It sends nothing at all for any other visitor, and it never records who you are.

On our checkout page only, we load Square's payment tools so that you can pay without being sent to another website. Square receives your card details directly — they never reach our servers — and Square may set cookies on that page for fraud prevention. Those tools load on the checkout page and nowhere else on this site, which is why every other page here stays cookie-free.

We do not combine any of these with anything else, we do not use them for advertising, and we do not sell or share the results. You are welcome to verify all of this with your browser's developer tools; we would rather you checked than took our word for it.

20. Your California Privacy Rights (CCPA/CPRA)

If you are a California resident, you have the following rights regarding your personal information:

• Right to Know: You have the right to request information about the personal information we have collected about you and how we have used and disclosed it.
• Right to Delete: You have the right to request the deletion of your personal information that we have collected from you, subject to certain exceptions.
• Right to Access: You have the right to request a copy of the specific pieces of personal information we have collected about you.
• Right to Correct: You have the right to request the correction of inaccurate personal information that we maintain about you.
• Right to Opt-Out of Sale/Sharing: You have the right to opt out of the "sale" or "sharing" of your personal information. As we do not sell or share personal information, this right is noted for informational purposes.
• Right to Non-Discrimination: We will not discriminate against you for exercising any of your CCPA rights.

To exercise any of these rights, please contact us using the information in Section 28. We will need to verify your identity before processing your request and will respond within the timeframes permitted by law (typically 45 days).

21. "Do Not Sell or Share My Personal Information"

Because we do not sell or share personal information for cross-context behavioral advertising, a "Do Not Sell or Share" link is not required on our website. We provide this statement for full transparency: We do not sell or share your personal information.

22. Data Retention

We retain personal information for as long as is reasonably necessary to fulfill the purposes for which it was collected.

• Lead Form Data: Retained for a reasonable period to provide our services and conduct follow-up communications.
• Client Data: Retained for the duration of our service relationship and for a reasonable period thereafter as required for our business records and legal obligations.
• Tracking Data: Retained as necessary to provide historical reporting to our clients.

23. Data Security

We implement reasonable security measures to protect the information we collect. These measures include rate limiting and an anti-bot honeypot on our lead form, strict access controls on our database and client dashboards, and the use of reputable, US-hosted cloud infrastructure. However, no method of electronic transmission or storage is 100% secure, and we cannot guarantee its absolute security.

24. Third-Party Processors (Service Providers)

We use the following third-party service providers to help us operate our business and provide our services. These providers are contractually bound to use data only on our behalf and for our specified purposes.

• Vercel: Website and application hosting.
• Supabase: Database hosting.
• Google PageSpeed/Lighthouse API: For providing site performance data in our Health Check.
• Anthropic API: For AI audits and "mystery shopper" queries.
• Cloudflare: For DNS and security on certain web properties.
• Stripe (Planned): For processing credit card and subscription payments. We will not see or store your full credit card numbers.
• Resend (Planned): For delivering transactional emails, such as monthly reports.

25. Data Breach Notification

In the unfortunate event of a data breach that compromises the personal information of California residents, we will comply with all applicable California data breach notification laws. This includes providing notice to affected individuals and, where required by law, to the California Attorney General.

26. Children's Privacy

Our Website and services are intended for a business audience and are not directed to children under the age of 18. We do not knowingly collect personal information from children under 13 (or 16, as applicable under the CCPA). If you believe we have inadvertently collected such information, please contact us immediately so we can delete it.

27. Updates to this Privacy Policy

We may update this Privacy Policy from time to time. When we do, we will post the updated policy on this page and revise the "Effective Date" at the top. We encourage you to review this policy periodically.

28. Contact Information

For any questions about this Privacy Policy or to exercise your privacy rights, please contact us:

Berean Trustbuilt Tech team@berean.llc 8863 Greenback Ln, Ste 230, Orangevale, CA 95662

PART C — SUPPLEMENTAL CCPA PRIVACY NOTICE

This notice supplements the information contained in our Privacy Policy and applies solely to visitors, users, and others who reside in the State of California.

Sale and Sharing of Personal Information: We do not sell personal information. We do not share personal information for the purpose of cross-context behavioral advertising.

Your Rights: As a California resident, you have the right to know, access, delete, and correct your personal information. You also have the right to not be discriminated against for exercising these rights.

How to Exercise Your Rights: To make a request, please contact us using the information provided in Section 28 of our Privacy Policy.

© 2026 Berean Trustbuilt Tech. All rights reserved. Berean, LLC.