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 author it in plain language by asking Murph to write your acceptance policy. You don’t pick from a fixed menu of categories — you describe your rules, and the agent reads what you wrote.

​

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.

​

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.

​

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.

​

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.

​

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.

​

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.