The ToS changed three weeks before the launch
Legal pages get updated on engineering's clock, not marketing's — which is exactly why they leak.
A competitor rewrote its terms with no announcement. Three weeks later the feature shipped. Legal pages move on engineering's clock, not marketing's.
A competitor quietly added two defined terms to their terms of service: Model Output and Inference Provider. No changelog entry. No email. No post. The "last updated" line at the top of the page moved by one day and that was the whole announcement.
Three weeks later they launched an AI assistant.
Legal writes to a different clock
Marketing pages ship when the campaign is ready. Landing page, pricing tier, launch post, the demo video — all of it waits for a date somebody picked in a planning doc.
Legal pages don't work that way. A new feature that touches customer data cannot go live under terms that don't cover it, so counsel has to land the language before the feature is public. If the rollout involves design partners or a private beta, the terms have to cover them too — which pushes the update even earlier.
The result is a systematic lead time. The legal page is the one public surface where the company is obligated to describe what it's about to do, in advance, in writing, and with no incentive to make it interesting.
What actually shows up
The definitions section is the richest part. New defined terms are the clearest tell — a company doesn't define Inference Provider unless something is about to use one.
Past that, a short list of things worth noticing:
- Subprocessor additions. A new cloud vendor or model provider appearing on the list is infrastructure news before it's product news. We've written about reading a subprocessor list on its own.
- Data-retention windows. A window that shortens usually means an enterprise deal forced it. A window that lengthens often means something is being trained or replayed.
- New legal entities and jurisdictions. A new subsidiary in the governing-law clause is a market entry that nobody wrote a blog post about.
- SLA credit tiers. Tightening these is a confidence signal about the underlying infrastructure. Loosening them is the opposite.
- Beta or preview disclaimers. Language carving out "Preview Features" from the warranty means preview features are coming.
None of this is subtle once you're looking. The problem is that nobody looks.
The reason they go unread
Terms of service are long, dull, and written to be skimmed once at signup and never again. Diffing one by hand means keeping an old copy, remembering to check, and reading nine pages of boilerplate to find the two sentences that moved.
That's the part Seeto automates: it watches pages like this continuously and surfaces the change itself as a discrete event, so the diff lands in front of you instead of waiting to be discovered. It won't tell you that a new defined term means an AI launch in three weeks — that read is yours, and it's the part worth your time. The same logic applies to the trust and security pages most teams also never revisit.
The most honest page a company publishes is the one it assumes you'll never read.