Effective date: September 1, 2026
SearchCarriers gives you tools to research motor carriers, brokers, shippers, and other DOT registered entities. These Terms cover everything we offer: the website, the web app, our APIs, SC Connect and other OAuth integrations, MCP and AI assistant connectors, the browser extension, authorized embeds, partner distributions, webhooks, and emailed reports (the "Service"). Using it means you accept these Terms. If you sign up for a company, you confirm you can bind it and "you" includes that company.
You must be at least 18 and located in North America (United States, Canada, Mexico). We do not accept accounts from outside North America and may suspend any account we believe is operated from outside it. Keep your information accurate and your credentials secure; you are responsible for everything done under your account, so tell us promptly if you suspect misuse. We may suspend or close any account at any time, including for convenience.
Use the Service lawfully. Do not use it to harass or harm anyone, scrape or crawl it outside the official API, bypass rate limits or security controls, reverse engineer it, send malware or spam, impersonate anyone, or overload it.
Carrier and entity data from the Service (ratings, scores, inspections, crashes, insurance, equipment, authority history, and contacts) is licensed for your internal research and business decisions, within your plan's limits. Vetting, compliance checks, and loading records into your own systems are fine. You may not resell, redistribute, sublicense, or publicly publish the data, share bulk exports outside your organization, build a competing data product, or present it as your own. Exports, reports, alerts, and API results all count as data here. An embed we authorized may show its results to your site visitors, but nobody may bulk copy that output.
Our scores, signals, and analytics are estimates built from public data and our own modeling. They are not recommendations, endorsements, official safety ratings, or guarantees, and we are not affiliated with the FMCSA. Public data can be wrong or stale, so treat the Service as one input. Who you hire or contract with is your decision and your responsibility.
We are not a consumer reporting agency under the Fair Credit Reporting Act, and nothing in the Service is a consumer report. Do not use the Service to decide anyone's eligibility for credit, insurance, employment, housing, or any other purpose regulated by the FCRA.
7.1 Credentials and quotas. API keys and OAuth, refresh, and extension tokens are tied to your organization. Do not share them outside it, rotate them if exposed, and expect us to revoke any credential we believe is misused. Your plan sets rate limits and monthly quotas; exceeding them may mean throttling or suspension, and we do not bill overage, so higher volume means a higher plan.
7.2 Versions. We may add, change, or retire endpoints and response formats, and will give at least 30 days notice in our API changelog before a breaking change or a cut to rate limits.
7.3 Storing API data. Keep only what you need, refresh it so you are not acting on stale records, and delete Service data within 30 days after your subscription ends.
7.4 Use case review and API addenda. Some API plans include a kickoff review. If we approve your intended use there, we will put the approved uses, retention allowance, integration type, and any permitted distribution in writing. That document controls only where it says it changes a specific section; everything else in these Terms still applies. Without one, Sections 4 and 7.5 govern your API use. We may suspend access for use outside the approved scope.
7.5 Building for others. You may not sell or distribute a product, service, or dataset built on our data or API to anyone outside your organization unless we approved it under 7.4. Internal integrations are fine.
7.6 Apps and AI assistants you connect. When you authorize a third party app, MCP client, or AI assistant, we deliver the data you asked for to that tool, and its own terms govern what it does with it. Revoke access any time in your settings.
Watch alerts, insurance alerts, emailed reports, and webhooks are best effort and may be delayed or fail, and we are not liable for decisions made or missed because of them. Securing your webhook endpoint is your job.
Customer Data is what you put into the Service: lineups, notes, statuses, contacts, VIN lists, questionnaires, and uploads. It stays yours. We use it to run the Service and to produce de-identified aggregate statistics, and delete it a reasonable time after your account closes. Submissions are different: tips, fraud reports, feedback, and equipment photos. You give us a worldwide, perpetual, royalty free, sublicensable license to use them in our products. The Service itself, including its software, models, enriched data, and branding, is ours, and your license to use it is limited and non transferable.
Document analysis, image verification, and similar features send your uploads to third party AI providers and return estimates, not proof of fraud. Do not upload anything you cannot share with a processor.
If you buy for a company, that company is the customer, its admins control seats and can see team usage, and it owns its identity provider. Free trials convert to a paid subscription unless you cancel first. Beta features are as is and may change or be withdrawn. Our affiliate program has its own terms.
Paid plans renew automatically at the then current price until you cancel. We will email you at least 30 days before a price increase, and it applies at your next billing cycle. Cancel any time and keep access through the period you paid for. Fees are not refundable, including partial periods, except where the law requires it.
The Service is provided "as is" and "as available," with no warranty of any kind, including merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, accuracy, and non infringement. We are not liable for indirect, incidental, special, consequential, or punitive damages, and our total liability for any claim will not exceed what you paid us in the 12 months before it. We are not liable for injury, property damage, cargo loss, or business loss arising from any accident, theft, fraud, double brokering, identity theft, or regulatory action involving an entity you researched here; those risks stay with the parties to that transaction. You will defend and indemnify us against claims arising from your use of the Service, your breach of these Terms, or your violation of a third party's rights, including negligent hiring, negligent selection, negligent entrustment, and vicarious liability claims tied to a company you chose to work with, whether or not you used our data.
We are not liable for delays or failures caused by events beyond our reasonable control, including outages of hosting, networks, and the public data sources we depend on.
If we receive legal process about your use of the Service, we may comply without notice where notice is prohibited or inappropriate, we have no duty to challenge it for you, our records may be produced, and you will reimburse our reasonable costs of responding.
We may add, change, or remove features and may suspend or discontinue the Service. We may also update these Terms; for material changes we will email you or post a notice in the Service, and continued use after the new effective date means you accept them.
North Carolina law governs these Terms and any dispute about them or the Service, without regard to conflict of law rules. Disputes go exclusively to the state or federal courts in Wake County, North Carolina, and both of us consent to that venue.
Our Privacy Policy is part of these Terms. Questions: SearchCarriers, PO Box 1109, Angier, NC 27501, support@searchcarriers.com, or the support channels in your account.