methodology / Privacy & Compliance / #48
Terms of service page presence
#48 · Required · Web Standards · legal · Privacy & Compliance · weight 0.7% · impl implemented · method v1.2.0
Web Standards item — Legal
This factor is part of Web Standards — the table-stakes binary layer of the score. It is graded pass/fail and gates the Web Quality score; it is not weighted into Web Quality itself.
- Pass criteria
- Tolerant — passes on pass or warn.
- Web Standards label
- Terms of service published
- Excluded for
- Personal site, Blog
- Why it's required
- Commercial sites need ToS to define the relationship with visitors. Read-only blogs and personal sites don't.
What this means for your business
Without one, you have no written agreement with the people using your site — which makes refund disputes, chargebacks, and copied content much harder to fight. A basic version takes an afternoon and protects you for years.
Plain title: You have a terms of service page
What we measure
Terms of service set the legal contract with your visitors and limit your liability. They're optional but strongly recommended for any site that collects data or makes commitments.
How to improve your score
Generate one with a service like Termly or iubenda and link from your footer.
Facts
Implementation notes
Probe common URLs (`/terms`, `/tos`, `/terms-of-service`) plus footer link extraction.
When this applies
Terms of service are not required for purely personal, non-commercial sites.
- Marked n/a for site types: Personal site.
Scoring
Scoring formulas are versioned with the methodology. The current method (v1.2.0) maps raw measurements to pass, warn, fail. Factor weights determine how much each contributes to the composite — see the methodology index for the full table.
Version history
| Version | Change | Date |
|---|---|---|
| v1.2.0 | Factor introduced. Status: live. Scoring impl: implemented. | 2026-04-25 |