AI Tools and Website Changes Policy

If a change made with an AI tool breaks your website, we restore your most recent daily backup from before the break, at no extra charge, and the changes saved since then are lost. If you would rather we find and undo only the one bad change so you keep everything else, that is billable work, because it can take hours. Using AI tools on your website is your choice and at your own risk, and we do not provide advice, setup or support for AI-driven changes.

What this policy covers

This policy covers any change made to your website by an AI tool, or using code or instructions an AI tool wrote. That includes:

AI agents working directly in your website or browser, such as ones that edit pages, templates, menus and settings.
Connections between an AI tool and your site, such as a Jetpack connection, a connected WordPress account, an application password, an API key, or an AI tool using your logged-in browser session.
Code added to your site, such as HTML, CSS, JavaScript or PHP, through your theme, a page builder's custom code area, a snippet plugin or a file.
Plugins, themes and settings installed, changed or suggested by an AI tool.

It does not cover text drafted by an AI tool and pasted in by a person, or work we do ourselves. It also does not apply when the cause is our updates, our hosting, or a plugin or theme bug. Those are fixed as part of your Care Plan. This policy is only about changes you or your team make using AI.

Why we have this policy

AI is a great tool, and we use it ourselves. But an AI tool that can change a live website can change many pages quickly, with no one reviewing each change, and it will keep trying to complete a task even when the safe route is blocked. When something breaks, the one bad change is buried among dozens of saves. Shared parts of a site, such as a header, a menu, a template or a global widget, can break every page at once. Working out what went wrong, and then fixing only that, can take an hour or more, and sometimes several hours. Restoring a backup is fast.

What we do when your site breaks

You have two options.

Option 1: Restore a backup (included). We restore the most recent daily backup taken before the break. This is part of your Care Plan. Everything saved after that backup is lost, including edited text, new pages, orders, new users and form entries, and we do not redo that work. For example, if you made changes this morning and your site broke this evening, we restore last night's backup.

Option 2: Targeted fix (billable). We investigate, find the change that caused the break, and reverse only that change, so you keep your other work. This is a Work Request. It is billed from the first minute of investigation, in 15-minute increments, at the rate in your agreement with us (our standard rate is $100 USD or $135 CAD per hour). We give you an estimate first and do not start without your approval. We cannot promise that we will be able to isolate a single change. If we cannot, you pay for the time spent, and we fall back to restoring a backup.

If your site is down, we put it in maintenance mode right away, so visitors see a maintenance page instead of an error, and we email you both options. We start work as soon as you tell us which one you prefer.

What we do not do

We do not advise on, design, set up, review or support AI workflows. This includes questions about what an AI tool should or should not be allowed to do on your site, and requests to change or build custom code so that it works better with AI. If you need that kind of help, we may decline it, or it may be quoted as a Work Request, and a support retainer would be needed.

We also do not install, activate, review or support plugins or code written by an AI tool. AI-written plugins and code edits made through the plugin or theme editor are the riskiest changes an AI tool can make, especially anything involving payments, logins, access control or stored keys and passwords. We may deactivate or remove them if they put your site at risk.

Security alerts and investigations

AI activity on a website can look the same as a hacking attempt, such as plugins being uploaded repeatedly or pages and settings changing quickly. If we see activity that looks suspicious, we may lock the site down to protect it and your data, and we will contact you as soon as we can. Time spent investigating, containing and reversing this, including when the cause turns out to be an AI tool, may be billed as a Work Request.

AI tools must never use or be connected through our administrator accounts. If an AI tool acts through a connection that belongs to us, its changes are recorded under our name, which makes problems harder to diagnose.

Which backup we use

We keep automatic backups of your site every day, going back 30 days. We restore the most recent one taken before the break. If you took a manual backup right before making changes, tell us and we will try to restore it, but we cannot promise it is complete or that it will restore cleanly. If it does not, we use the automatic backup.

To choose the right backup, we need to know which AI tool you used, what you asked it to do, and roughly when.

If something breaks

Stop making changes, and tell any AI tool you are using to stop too. Every extra save makes it harder to tell what went wrong.
Contact us and tell us what you asked the AI tool to do and roughly when.
Please do not click the Restore button in your backup plugin yourself. A restore replaces your site, and doing it yourself can lose more work than necessary.

Before you use AI on your site

You are responsible for what an AI tool does on your site. Take a full backup first, and keep a copy off the site. If you would like us to make a backup before you start, ask us first. Make changes in small steps, and check the live site after each one. Be extra careful with shared parts such as headers, footers, menus, templates and global widgets, and keep a record of what you asked the AI to change, and when. Use limited access, and remove it when the work is done. Our blog post, Using AI on Your WordPress Site: A Great Tool, Handled With Care, covers all of this in more detail.