AI USE POLICY FOR SHOPPERS

The entire value of a mystery shop is that a real person went to the location and had a genuine, firsthand experience. That’s what our clients pay for. Because of that, everything of substance in your report — what happened, what you saw and heard, times, names, quotes, and whether standards were met — must come from you, based on what you actually experienced.

AI tools may help you express your own observations. They may never supply the observations themselves.

You may use AI to help you say what you experienced:

• Fixing grammar, spelling, and punctuation in writing you wrote yourself
• Improving the clarity or flow of your own sentences
• Organizing your own notes into the report format

You may not use AI to supply what you should have observed:

• Generating narrative about your visit that you didn’t write from memory
• Inventing, embellishing, or “filling in” any detail, time, name, quote, or observation
• Answering evaluation questions you didn’t personally observe the answer to
• Producing any statement about the location that isn’t from your own firsthand experience
• Asking AI to expand brief notes into a fuller narrative — the AI will invent detail you didn’t observe, even when your notes were real

If AI supplied any fact or observation, it’s a violation. If AI only changed how your own facts were worded, you’re fine.

Any report found to contain fabricated or AI-supplied observations will be rejected without payment, and the shopper will be permanently removed from our shopper pool. We may also withhold payment on other reports and pursue recovery of fees already paid where fabrication is found.