CrawlHawk

Acceptable Use Policy

Effective date: 31 May 2026 | Last updated: 10 July 2026

This Acceptable Use Policy ("AUP") sets out the rules that apply to all Users of the CrawlHawk service (the "Service") operated by New Horizon Platforms Kft. (the "Operator"). The AUP forms part of the Terms and Conditions and applies to every Crawl and every interaction with the Service. The AUP is a fundamental term. Breach of the AUP may result in immediate suspension or termination of your Account, including forfeiture of unused Credits in cases of serious or repeated breach.

1. General Principle

You must use the Service lawfully, in good faith, and in a manner consistent with its purpose: legitimate web crawling, link discovery, sitemap generation and product data extraction from publicly accessible websites that you have the right to crawl. You must not use the Service in any way that harms Target Websites, their operators, their visitors, other Users, the Operator, third parties, or the integrity and availability of the Service.

2. Core User Warranties

Every time you submit a Crawl, you confirm and warrant the following:

  • you have the legal right and authority to instruct an automated system to access, retrieve, copy, store and analyse the content of the Target Website for the purposes of your Crawl;
  • your Crawl complies with the terms of service, automated-access policies and robots exclusion protocol (robots.txt) of the Target Website, or you have explicit written authorisation from the Target Website operator to disregard them;
  • your Crawl does not circumvent any technical access control, paywall, login wall, IP block, CAPTCHA or rights-protection measure in a manner prohibited by applicable law;
  • your Crawl complies with all applicable laws, including laws on computer misuse, unauthorised access, intellectual property, database rights, trade secrets, personal data protection and unfair competition;
  • your Crawl is not designed or used to overload, disrupt, damage or impair the operation of any Target Website, server or network.

3. Prohibited Use Cases

You must not use the Service to engage in, facilitate or attempt any of the following:

3.1 Unauthorised Access and System Abuse

  • accessing computer systems or data that you are not authorised to access;
  • attempting to bypass login walls, authentication mechanisms, two-factor authentication or session controls in a manner prohibited by applicable law;
  • harvesting login credentials, session tokens, API keys or other authentication material;
  • exploiting vulnerabilities, security weaknesses or misconfigurations of Target Websites;
  • circumventing IP blocks, rate limits or other access controls that have been imposed against you specifically as a result of prior misuse.

3.2 Personal Data and Privacy Abuse

  • mass harvesting of personal data (including names, email addresses, telephone numbers, photographs, profile data) where you do not have a lawful basis under the GDPR or other applicable data-protection law;
  • collecting personal data for purposes of unsolicited marketing, spam, harassment, doxing, profiling without lawful basis, or surveillance;
  • compiling databases of personal data for resale, dissemination or other unauthorised purposes;
  • crawling sources whose terms or applicable law explicitly prohibit the harvesting of personal data they contain.

3.3 Intellectual Property and Database Abuse

  • large-scale copying of copyrighted content for infringing distribution, mirroring, republication or training of generative models, where you do not have a licence, an applicable statutory exception (including the text-and-data mining exceptions under Articles 3 and 4 of Directive (EU) 2019/790, subject to opt-outs validly expressed by rights holders) or other lawful basis;
  • extraction or re-utilisation of substantial parts of databases protected by the sui generis database right (Directive 96/9/EC) without authorisation from the database maker;
  • misappropriation of trade secrets;
  • systematic disregard of machine-readable rights reservations (including but not limited to TDM opt-outs expressed in robots.txt, meta tags or other appropriate means).

3.4 Service Disruption and Aggressive Crawling

  • crawling at a frequency, concurrency or volume that overloads, degrades or threatens to degrade the operation of any Target Website;
  • using the Service as part of a denial-of-service, distributed denial-of-service or stress-test attack;
  • orchestrating multiple Accounts or repeated short crawls to circumvent rate limits intended to protect Target Websites.

3.5 Harmful and Illegal Content

  • crawling or extracting content that is unlawful under applicable law, including child sexual abuse material (zero-tolerance with reporting to authorities), terrorist content, content inciting violence or hatred, or content the dissemination of which is prohibited by court order or competent authority;
  • using the Service in the preparation or distribution of malware, phishing kits, scam pages or fraudulent infrastructure;
  • evading sanctions, money laundering, terrorist financing, or providing services to entities or persons subject to international sanctions.

3.6 Misrepresentation and Account Abuse

  • creating Accounts using false, misleading or stolen identification or payment details;
  • creating multiple Accounts to circumvent restrictions, suspensions or rate limits;
  • reselling Service capacity, Crawl Results or Credit access to third parties without prior written consent from the Operator, except to the extent that the User uses the Service to perform work for its own clients in a normal professional engagement.

3.7 Service Integrity

  • attempting to gain unauthorised access to the Service's infrastructure or to other Users' accounts or data;
  • probing, scanning or testing the vulnerability of the Service, except as part of a coordinated responsible-disclosure process initiated through support@crawlhawk.com;
  • interfering with or disrupting the integrity, availability or performance of the Service;
  • reverse engineering, scraping or extracting data from the Service itself for the purpose of building a competing product.

3.8 Contact Data Extraction Abuse

  • using contact data extraction features to collect personal data of identified or identifiable natural persons (such as names, positions, direct email addresses or direct telephone numbers) without a valid and documented lawful basis under the GDPR, as required under Section 5.7 of the Terms and Conditions;
  • using extracted contact data for unsolicited marketing communications in violation of applicable e-privacy, anti-spam or direct-marketing laws;
  • failing to provide the information required by Articles 13 and 14 GDPR to the persons whose personal data have been extracted;
  • continuing to process extracted personal data after a valid objection, restriction request or erasure request by the person concerned.

4. Robots.txt, Terms of Service and Rights Reservations

You must respect the robots exclusion protocol (robots.txt) of every Target Website and any other machine-readable or contractual rights reservations applicable to the content of the Target Website, including text-and-data-mining opt-outs validly expressed under Article 4(3) of Directive (EU) 2019/790.

The Operator may, as a matter of technical capability, offer modes that are capable of processing websites with dynamic loading, access controls or automated-access signals, including websites that do not implement robots.txt or whose configuration is not enforced at the platform level. These capabilities are provided only for lawful and authorised use cases — such as a User crawling its own websites, a User acting under explicit written authorisation from the Target operator, or other lawful purposes. The availability of such technical capability is not a representation by the Operator that any particular Crawl is authorised or lawful. You remain solely responsible for that determination.

5. AI Product Scraper — Additional Rules

When using the AI Product Scraper or other AI-assisted features, you must not:

  • submit prompts, configurations or input designed to cause the underlying AI providers to produce content prohibited by their usage policies;
  • use AI-extracted output to misrepresent, deceive consumers, or commit unfair commercial practices (for example, by misrepresenting a competitor's product attributes, prices, availability or origin);
  • use AI-extracted product data in violation of applicable consumer-protection, advertising, food-safety, labelling, pharmaceutical or other sector-specific law.

6. Reporting Violations

If you encounter Crawls, output or behaviour that you believe violates this AUP or applicable law, or if you are the operator of a website that you believe is being crawled in violation of this AUP, please contact us at support@crawlhawk.com, identifying the relevant Crawl, URL or Account where possible, and explaining the issue. Notices of allegedly illegal content are handled in accordance with Article 16 of the DSA and our Copyright and IP Policy.

7. Enforcement

The Operator may, at its reasonable discretion and depending on the seriousness and recurrence of the violation, take any of the following actions:

  • issue a warning;
  • cancel or terminate ongoing Crawls;
  • restrict, suspend or terminate access to specific features or to the Account as a whole;
  • in cases of serious or repeated breach, terminate the Account and forfeit unused Credits without refund, subject to mandatory consumer-protection rules;
  • block specific Target Websites or categories of Targets from the Service;
  • report the matter to the competent authorities, including in cases of suspected criminal offences;
  • pursue any legal remedy available to it.

8. Internal Review of Enforcement Decisions

If we take any of the actions described above against you, you may submit an internal complaint within six (6) months from the decision. To do so, send an email to support@crawlhawk.com with the subject "Complaint — Moderation Decision", briefly describing the decision you are challenging and the grounds for the complaint. We will examine the complaint without undue delay and in a non-discriminatory manner, and we will reverse the decision if it was unfounded. Decisions on complaints are not taken solely on the basis of automated means.

9. Further Remedies

If you disagree with the outcome of an internal review, you may, where applicable under law, refer the dispute to a certified out-of-court dispute settlement body. This does not affect your right to bring proceedings before a court.

10. Changes to This Policy

We may update this AUP from time to time. Material changes will be notified through the Service.

11. Contact

For any question about this AUP, please contact us at support@crawlhawk.com.