Acceptance policy

Your acceptance policy is the set of content rules your storefront judges buyer transactions against — which advertisers, categories, and creatives you will and won’t carry. It is the content half of Govern: the policy says what is acceptable; your approval settings say whether a human reviews at all. They’re independent dials, and your media-buy policy does its work in manual mode — where it decides which buys clear on their own and which are held for you. In auto mode the gate is skipped entirely: every buy forwards and nothing is evaluated. You can author it either way:

• Open the portable Acceptance Policy page from Murph, Claude, ChatGPT, or another MCP Apps host to create or edit the full policy inline.
• Tell Murph the exact rules you want. Murph shows you the complete markdown for confirmation, then writes it through the same typed configuration contract.

Creating or activating policy versions requires an account administrator. Other storefront members can review the active policy and immutable history without receiving a hidden mutation path through the Page or MCP API. You don’t pick from a fixed menu of categories. You describe your rules, and the agent reads what you wrote. Every save creates an immutable version and can activate it atomically, so version history never contains a half-applied update.

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Edit and restore versions

The Acceptance Policy page always reads the current active policy and its version history. Save and activate creates a new version without overwriting the old one. If versions exist but none is active, the history remains visible so an administrator can preview, reactivate, or reuse a version as a new draft. The page performs those operations directly; it does not turn a button click into a new chat prompt or depend on a particular host model.

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Policy vs. approval mode

These are two separate dials. Keeping them straight is the most common point of confusion: In auto mode the policy isn’t consulted — everything forwards. In manual mode with no policy written, nothing pre-clears, so every media buy is held for you. With both in place, the agent clears clearly-on-policy buys and holds the rest.

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How the agent reads your policy

The pre-screen reads your written policy against the buyer’s submission. It is not a fixed category list — a rule like “we don’t accept fast-food advertisers” is honored even though “fast food” isn’t a built-in category, because the agent derives the subjects you wrote and matches them against the submission. It also recognizes common evasion (look-alike characters, light obfuscation) so a rule isn’t sidestepped by spelling. When it cannot judge a submission with confidence, it errs toward holding it for you. When no policy document is available, the Acceptance Policy Page starts with a conservative draft: no category is pre-cleared, every advertiser, category, and creative needs review, and illegal, malicious, deceptive, discriminatory, exploitative, phishing, impersonation, or destination-concealing submissions are flagged for operator rejection. This draft has no effect until an account administrator reviews, saves, and activates it. While that starter remains active, its review-all contract also makes the deterministic pre-screen hold every submission for an operator; it is not just instructional copy.

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The three verdicts

When mediaBuyApproval is manual, the pre-screen sorts each media buy into one of three buckets (in auto mode none of this runs — every buy forwards):

• Clearly on policy → auto-forwarded without waiting for you. The buy books quoted products and hits no rule you wrote.
• Needs a look → queued for you. Evidence is thin, the policy is ambiguous, or a rule says this category needs review.
• Clearly against an explicit rule you wrote → surfaced as a strong decision-support signal on the queued item.

That last bucket is a recommendation, not an action: the buy still queues for you, and you make the call.

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The second opinion

On top of the deterministic pre-screen, an AI layer gives a second opinion — but only as a one-way veto on auto-approval. It runs only when the pre-screen would otherwise auto-clear a buy, and it can only downgrade that to “needs a look” if it spots a policy conflict the rules missed (for example, a competitive- exclusivity clause you wrote in prose). It can never approve a buy on its own, never reject one, and never overrides a hold. It also fails closed: if the AI layer is unavailable, errors, or is uncertain, the buy escalates to you rather than auto-forwarding. The agent never auto-clears a buy without a corroborating second opinion.

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How creatives are evaluated against your policy

Creative review applies the same content rules to a buyer’s submitted creative, plus a rendered-image check that looks at the actual pixels for brand cues, prohibited categories, and third-party marks. As with media buys, the AI layer can route a creative to human review but cannot approve one over a clear policy violation the deterministic checks already found. For locked assets — a product shot, logo, or book cover you’ve marked as exact-fidelity — there’s a stronger, deterministic guarantee that the AI layer cannot override:

• A creative whose final render goes through the platform’s locked-asset compositor preserves your supplied asset exactly, and clears that check.
• A final-stage creative that carries your locked asset but did not go through that deterministic path — for example, one that re-generated or edited your product from a reference — is blocked from auto-finalizing and held back for a human to inspect. A buyer’s generated creative cannot quietly substitute a look-alike stand-in for your locked product at final approval.

These fidelity checks are deterministic and run independently of the AI layer, so a crafted creative or brief can’t talk the reviewer into clearing them — they err toward human review whenever exact fidelity isn’t deterministically guaranteed.

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What the agent never does on its own

• It never auto-rejects. The strongest automated action against a buy is a decision-support flag on your queue.
• It never changes an approval gate for you. As it watches your decisions it may suggest opting a consistently-clean buyer into per-buyer auto-approve — but you author the carve-out. See the learned suggestion in seller analytics.
• It never auto-clears without a second opinion. If the AI layer can’t corroborate, the buy goes to you.