Resource · Telling your customers
What counts as a material change, and why
The rule Xither applies to decide which vendor page changes reach an inbox, published in full — so you can check it rather than trust it.
A page change is material when a fact moved
Never because the bytes moved. That distinction is the whole product. A vendor’s privacy policy can change by a line of formatting every week; the question that matters is whether something a contract counts — a sub-processor, a retention window, where data sits — is different from what it was.
A monitor that decides what you hear about is making a judgment on your behalf, and a judgment you cannot inspect is one you have to take on faith. Every classification here is a function of rows already in the record, so any verdict can be re-derived from the database without trusting this page — and the counts below were produced by doing exactly that, running the record back through the same function the alert path uses.
Three tiers
obligation
starts a clock in an agreement you have signed
disclosure
changes what you must tell your own customers, with no clause counting days
operational
sets a deadline from engineering reality rather than from a contract
Where several facts move at once, the change takes the highest tier present. An alert never averages.
Every fact kind, and where it sits
| Fact | Tier | Why | Recorded |
|---|---|---|---|
| residency | obligation | Your data moves country. | 25 |
| subprocessor | obligation | A new company is processing your customers' data, or one stopped. | 21 |
| retention | obligation | How long they keep it changed. | 4 |
| training use | obligation | Your data becomes training data, or stops being it. | 3 |
| silence consent | obligation | A clock that runs against your silence appeared or moved. | 0 |
| certification | disclosure | What you can claim on your own trust page changed. | 9 |
| notice channel | disclosure | How you are supposed to hear about any of the above changed. | 2 |
| deprecation | operational | A model or API you depend on is being retired. | 62 |
| incident | operational | A dated outage a breach-notice clause may count from. | 0 |
What we record and refuse to alert on
page date · 57 recorded
A “Last Updated” line moving is corroboration for a change we can name. On its own it means the vendor edited a document in a way our extractors could not read — a blind spot to report in a digest, not a reason to email someone at 05:00.
What the rule does to the volume
Applied to the 1,228 page changes currently in the record: 45 material, 41 revisions, 1142 where nothing we can name moved. 3.7% of page changes reach an inbox.
The suppressed 96% is the point rather than a side effect. A register of fifteen vendors without this rule receives roughly sixty notifications a week to surface about one thing a month it is paying for, and a person who has learned to ignore an alert stream gets no value from the one that mattered.
What this rule does not do
It does not say whether a change is good, bad, risky or acceptable. It says which of our own extracted facts moved and which contractual question that fact answers. Nothing is scored or weighted, no model is in the loop, and the alert still shows the vendor’s own quote so the reader decides what it means.
It also cannot rank what it cannot read. A change on a page our extractors do not parse arrives as a revision at best, which is why the digest reports those separately instead of letting them look like quiet. How the record is kept.
Take it with you
The full ruleset as a Word document, useful if you are writing your own change-monitoring criteria or asking a vendor what theirs are. It is generated when you download it, so it carries the rules as they stand that day.
Common questions
- What is a material change to a vendor's terms?
- For monitoring purposes, one where a stated fact moved — a sub-processor added or removed, a retention window changed, data residency changed, a training-on-data position changed. A page whose bytes changed without any of those moving is not material, however large the diff.
- How do you avoid alert fatigue when monitoring vendor pages?
- By alerting on facts rather than on diffs. Applied to the record here, that suppresses about 96% of page changes — a register of fifteen vendors would otherwise get roughly sixty notifications a week to surface about one thing a month.
- Why is a changed 'Last Updated' date not material?
- Because on its own it means the vendor edited a document in a way we could not read. That is a blind spot worth reporting in a digest, not a reason to email someone at five in the morning. It is recorded, labeled a revision, and never alerted.
- Does Xither use AI to decide what is material?
- No. Every classification is a lookup against the published table below, applied to facts already stored as rows. Nothing is scored or weighted, there is no model in the loop, and any verdict can be re-derived from the database.
- Does the rule say whether a change is bad?
- No, and it deliberately cannot. It says which of our extracted facts moved and which contractual question that fact answers. The alert shows the vendor's own quote and the reader decides what it means.
Telling your customers
Work out who you owe notice, and by when.
- What happens downstream when an AI vendor changes a page
One edit, three contracts: the vendor, the company that embeds it, and that company's enterprise customer.
- Telling your customers a sub-processor changed
The notice to pass on, rendered from the same function the product uses to draft it — so the two cannot drift apart.
- Customer notice obligation worksheet
Who you owe notice and by when — against the finding that every published vendor window is 30 days or fewer, and the median is 15.
- Do you have to tell your customers?
Six questions in the order worth asking them — and the first is not what your contract says, because 96% of vendor page changes move no fact at all.
This describes how Xither classifies changes for alerting. It is not a legal definition of materiality, and your own agreements may define the term differently — where they do, theirs governs. The record behind this page is free to read, and corrections are free to request.