Three sentences from an ordinary online shop. One of them can cost you money.

Three sentences of the kind that sit on thousands of shop pages:

• “Now only €89, was €149.”
• “Our packaging is 100 percent climate neutral.”
• “Over 2000 happy customers rate us 5 stars.”

None of them sounds dangerous. All three are challengeable.

The first, because a price reduction has to reference the lowest price of the previous thirty days, not some earlier price you once charged. The second, because generic environmental claims need recognised evidence. The third, because you have to state whether and how you check that the reviews are genuine.

None of this is new, and most shop owners roughly know it. Knowing is not the problem. The problem is that these sentences are now written by a machine that does not have that knowledge, at a speed where nobody reads every text any more.

What happens when somebody notices

Usually a competitor notices. They are reading your site anyway, and a sentence you cannot substantiate is a cheap tool for them. Then a letter arrives.

For Germany, where most shops in the region also sell, these are the usual orders of magnitude:

Usual ranges under German unfair competition law. An amount in dispute of €15,000 does not mean €15,000 in costs, it means fees in the low four figures.

The real catch is not the first invoice. It is the cease-and-desist undertaking you sign. From then on the same mistake costs a contractual penalty the next time, per instance. If your AI wrote that sentence into thirty product pages, that is a different arithmetic.

One detail that often gets told wrong: since 2021 certain notices are cost-free in Germany, namely those about information and labelling duties in online trade and about data protection, for companies under 250 employees. Advertising claims are explicitly not among them. The three sentences above remain fully chargeable. Anyone telling you that cease-and-desist letters are no longer an issue is talking about a different category.

And in Luxembourg?

The German notice system does not exist here. Anyone who objects files an injunction action before the district court sitting in commercial matters, in summary proceedings. Competitors can sue, as can the ULC and the European Consumer Centre. Ignoring a court order carries a fine of €251 to €120,000.

The part that usually weighs more heavily on a shop than the money: the court can order the judgment to be published at your expense. And the burden of proof is on you. You have to demonstrate that your claim is accurate, not the claimant that it is false.

Why the usual advice does not work

“Just put it in the instructions and tell the AI not to do that.” Sounds reasonable. We measured it, on our own channel, not on a client's.

The instructions said, verbatim, that the model must not invent any numbers or promotional text not present in the script. In four out of five runs it did exactly that anyway: invented figures, “TOP DEAL”, “expert comparison”. Not out of malice, but because advertising usually looks like that and the model wanted to do the job well.

A ban in the instructions is not a brake. It is a request that was ignored 80 percent of the time.

What a real brake looks like

Below is the filter we put in front of our own production. Type in a sentence you could plausibly have on your own site, or click one of the examples. You will see immediately whether it passes, and if not, at which point and because of which rule.

Everything runs in your browser. Nothing is stored, nothing is sent to a server.

The decisive part is not the rules themselves, it is that you can switch profiles at the top. The rules live in a file, not in an instruction to the AI. You can read them, your lawyer can read them, and they decide the same way every time.

Two dates worth having in your calendar

2 August 2026, already passed. The transparency obligations of the EU AI Act apply from that day. Anyone publishing AI-generated content has to make it identifiable as such. An automation that sometimes sets the label and sometimes forgets is worse than none at all, because it creates the gap and the feeling of being covered at the same time.

27 September 2026, five weeks away. The EmpCo Directive applies from then. Generic environmental claims without recognised evidence become unlawful, as does climate neutrality based purely on offsetting. In Germany the transposition is already in the federal gazette.

Something you can do today, entirely without us: search your product copy for “sustainable”, “climate neutral”, “eco-friendly” and “carbon neutral”. Anything you cannot back with evidence has to go or become specific by 27 September. “Made from FSC-certified timber” is specific. “Sustainably produced” is not.

What we do if you bring us in

Three steps, plainly:

• We go through your copy once and tell you what stands out and what of it is urgent. One to two days.
• We write your rules into a file you and your lawyer can read. Not into an instruction to a language model, but into something checkable that does not change on its own.
• We put the check in front of publication. From then on no text goes out that breaks your own rules, and for every blocked text you see which rule caught it.

Fixed price, agreed up front. Most first workflows go live within one to three weeks. You do not have to operate anything yourself afterwards, and your rules and data are yours, including if you carry on without us at some point.

This is explicitly not a legal review. We are not lawyers and do not replace one. We make sure that whatever you or your lawyer decided is actually observed in day-to-day operation, every day, without anyone having to remember it.