Expert Application Terms

1 What applying does, and does not do

Submitting the expert application asks Squarespell to review you for the expert directory. It does not list you, and it does not create any obligation on us to list you.

Your application is stored privately. It is not published, not indexed, not included in the sitemap, not available through the site's public API, and not visible to anyone outside our review team.

A profile becomes public only when an administrator has completed the vetting checklist, recorded a review date, approved it and published it. Those are four separate deliberate actions and none of them happens automatically.

2 What you are telling us is true

By applying you confirm that the work you show is yours or that your role in it is described accurately, that the business or identity you give is genuinely yours, that the services you list are ones you actually take on, and that any figure you give us, years of experience, starting budget, response time, is honest.

We check these against your public work. We are not trying to catch you out; we are trying to be able to stand behind the directory. If something is complicated, most of your work is under NDA, or you did the front end and someone else did the build, tell us in the application. That is a better answer than a link that overstates your part.

• A claim we cannot verify is removed from the profile, not published with a caveat.
• A claim we find to be untrue ends the application, and ends a listing if one already exists.

3 Money buys nothing here

There is no fee to apply and no fee to be listed. No payment, commercial relationship, advertising spend or affiliate arrangement can obtain a listing, obtain a Vetted Expert badge, or change your position in the directory.

The organic ordering function is structurally prevented from reading commercial fields: it is handed an allow-list of what it may read, and the commercial fields are not on it. An automated test fails the build if that changes.

If clearly labelled paid expert visibility is ever introduced, it will be separated from the organic results, labelled where it appears, and excluded from the ordering calculation. It does not exist today.

4 What we do with what you send

Your work email is used to contact you about the application and, if you are listed, to forward visitor inquiries to you. It is never published, never placed in the page, and never returned by the API.

If you are declined, we keep the application so we can recognise a resubmission and so we can explain a past decision. You can ask us to delete it.

Access, correction and deletion requests are handled as described in the privacy policy.

5 Ending a listing

You can ask to be removed at any time and we will do it without asking why.

We may correct, suspend or remove a profile if a claim turns out to be untrue, if the contact route stops working, if the review lapses and cannot be renewed, or if we receive credible reports we are unable to resolve. Where the reason is something you can fix, we will tell you what it is first.