Concepts

Moderation API is organized as a four-level hierarchy. Most work happens inside a project; the other levels matter when you start scaling — adding teammates, separating environments, or running multiple products on the same plan.

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Organization

The organization is the top-level container. It owns:

• Billing and plan (quota, plan tier, invoices).
• Team members who can access the organization’s projects.
• Custom models, trained once and reusable across any channel in any project.
• Wordlists, managed in one place and enabled on the channels that need them.

A user can belong to multiple organizations, and an organization can contain multiple projects.

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Project

Projects scope your content and authors. Everything you submit to the API (content, authors, content queues, actions, and channels) belongs to a single project. Most teams use projects to separate environments like production and staging, or to keep distinct products apart. Each project has its own API key. When you create a project you fill in:

• A name for the dashboard.
• A domain: the website or app this project moderates. The AI uses it as context, which sharpens the accuracy of LLM-based policies like Guidelines.
• A type: pick a template to preconfigure channels and queues, or start from scratch.

Templates available today: Templates create the channels and queues. You decide which policies to enable on each channel.

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Channel

Channels live inside a project and represent a specific surface or content type. Common examples are chat, reviews, listings, usernames, and profile-bio. Each channel is configured independently, so you can apply strict rules to user-to-user messages while keeping product listings looser. A channel owns:

• Settings. Name, key (used to route requests, see below), description, and the content types it accepts (text, image, video, audio).
• Review thresholds. The cutoffs at which content gets flagged.
• Policies. The rules that score content. Toggle each one on or off per channel. See Policies for the full list.
• Insights. Opt-in signals like sentiment and language. They come back alongside policy results but don’t affect flagging.
• Dry-run mode. When on, API responses always return flagged: false so production traffic isn’t blocked, but content is still analyzed and lands in your queues. Use it to preview a channel before going live.

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Routing requests to a channel

You authenticate with a project’s API key. To pick which channel handles each request, the API checks, in order:

1. The channel field in the request body (see Submitting content).
2. A channel whose content type matches the request’s metaType. For example, metaType: "review" routes to a channel configured for reviews.
3. Otherwise, the newest channel in the project.

You can also set a channel as the project’s default route to override step 3.

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Policies

A policy is a single rule that runs against submitted content. Each enabled policy returns one entry in the API response’s policies array. Because policies are enabled per channel, the same project can run Toxicity on chat messages while only running Privacy on profile bios. Policies fall into two types: See the Policies overview for the full catalog. A few pieces sit above the channel and get attached to it:

• Custom models are trained at the organization level and can be enabled on any channel.
• Wordlists are also organization-level, then enabled per channel.
• Guidelines are written per channel, since the rules usually depend on the surface.

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Authors

Authors (your end users) are scoped to the project, not the channel. A single author can post into multiple channels. For example, the same user might send chat messages, write reviews, and update their profile bio. The author’s trust level and moderation history aggregate across every channel in the project.

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Review queues

Review queues collect content for human review. Queues are project-scoped and use filters to decide what shows up. Typical filters are channel, label, and the action that was taken. A project can have many queues, each tuned to a different reviewer workflow.

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Quota

Quota is shared across the organization. Each request to the /moderate endpoint consumes quota. Most requests cost one unit, though some content types and policies cost more. See Quota & usage for the per-policy cost table.