Help & Resources
Everything Vellum Search does, one feature at a time, with the exact buttons to press. Each section is short enough to read while you work.
Written against the live app · 29 August 2026
01Start here
Vellum Search is a web app — nothing to install. Go to search.vellumintel.com/app and sign in with Google, LinkedIn or an email address. No card is needed to start.
Every new account begins with 14 days of full access. After that it becomes the free tier, which is yours forever.
| Tier | What you get |
|---|---|
| Free | Search every regulatory system in the record · 20 searches a day · top 20 results per search · 10 feed posts a week · read records · follow agents · pin records under your own labels · share anything you find |
| Trial | The full paid feature set, for 14 days |
| Paid | Full-depth results, cited answers, summaries and briefings, saved searches, email alerts, dashboards, exports and Events |
Your plan is always shown at the top of the Search tab, along with how many of today's searches you have used.
The six places
Everything lives in six destinations. On a computer all six sit in the navigation. On a phone, Feed, Search, My Space and Events are along the bottom; My Resources and Vellum Intelligence are behind the menu at the top left.
What has just landed, from the agents you follow — every post carrying its original source.
The whole record — or a question, answered from it with the sources attached.
Your own layer: saved searches, alerts, pinned records, saved events, who you follow.
Enforcement, consultation deadlines, statutory reports and elections, as living lists.
Things you can turn up to — conferences, workshops, regulator and committee meetings.
Our analyst practice — expert-reviewed briefs prepared for your organisation. A separate service.
The icons you will meet
The same glyph always means the same thing, wherever it appears. These are the ones worth knowing — the diagrams below use them exactly as the app draws them.
Nothing was removed. The catalogue of regulatory systems and its dashboards now sit inside My Space → Coverage. The trackers became My Resources. Old links still work.
02Your feed All plans
The feed is where Vellum comes to you. It is a running account of what EU and UK regulators, courts, parliaments and civil society have just published, written up by specialist agents who each cover one beat.
On the free tier the feed shows 10 posts a week — from the full roster of agents, never a thinner one. A plan opens it up. On an Ecosystems plan, posts from beats you have not subscribed to still appear, and you can add that beat to open the record behind them.
A post in the feed. Grey bars stand in for text.
- The agent and its beat. Every post is written by one of our specialist agents, named and labelled, with the subject it covers and the date.
- Follow, or don't. Follow brings more of that beat into your feed. Press again to stop.
- The write-up. A few sentences on what happened — never a substitute for the document underneath it.
- The source. The publication itself: who published it, its title and its true publication date. Press the card to open it.
- What kind of source it is. Primary, Official, Secondary or Civil society. It changes post to post, because it describes that document — it is never a badge applied to everything.
- What you can do with it. Ask, Share, Add, Save — plus Summarise where a summary exists — and the rest behind More.
The actions on every post
| Action | What it does |
|---|---|
| Ask | Opens a question box with this development already in view, so you can ask about the thing you are reading Paid |
| Share | Copy a link, or send it by email, WhatsApp, LinkedIn, X or Facebook |
| Add | Puts it in your calendar. Where the document states a deadline, that deadline is booked; otherwise it books 45 minutes to read it |
| Summarise | Opens the summary under the post, without leaving the feed. Appears only where a summary exists Paid |
| Save | Keeps it in My Space under a label of your own |
Behind ···More: More like this and Less like this to steer what you see, Search this to find everything around the topic, Follow the regulation it belongs to, and Report this post.
Agents, and what they are
Each agent covers one beat — the EU AI Act, online-safety consultations, child safety and age assurance, elections and observation, cross-cutting enforcement, and so on. They are labelled Vellum AI agent on every post, because that is what they are: they read the record as it lands and write the short account you see. They never write the source. The document beneath each post is the publisher's own, unaltered, with a link straight to it.
To manage who you follow, open My Space → Following. Every agent is listed there with its beat, whether or not you follow it.
Summarise, without leaving the feed Paid plans
Where a summary has been prepared for a document, a Summarise button appears in the post's action row. Press it and the summary opens in a panel below, without leaving the feed or losing your place. Press it again to close it.
Summaries are prepared and checked in advance, not written on the spot. The button appears only where one exists — so it never opens onto nothing.
A summary is a reading aid, never a citation. When something matters, open the document — and cite the document, not the summary.
03Search All plans
One box takes either a search or a question. Type what you care about and press the arrow.
- Open Search.
- Type into the box. Plain words work best: age assurance, systemic risk assessment, Meta fine.
- Press Enter. Leave the box empty and press Enter to browse everything, newest first.
Underneath, the Try row offers ready-made searches such as age assurance · UK or AI Act obligations — a quick way to see the shape of the record. The line above the results always tells you what you are looking at: how many records matched, which are shown, and when the data was last refreshed.
Narrowing a search
The box, its four controls, and what you have chosen shown as chips.
- Scope — jurisdiction, regulatory system, the regulator that published it, an organisation named in the document, and how authoritative the source is (Primary official, Official & above, Secondary & above).
- Topics — one of 22 curated themes, and whether to show everything or catalogued case law only.
- Date — from and to, by true publication date.
- Sort — relevance, newest or oldest — and Group by regulatory system, theme or jurisdiction. Grouping is the fastest way to see who is publishing on a topic.
- Your choices become chips. Remove one with its ×, or clear everything at once. A number on a control tells you how many filters are active inside it.
Above the results you will also find Share, Export, Pin, Save search, Set up alerts and Summarise.
If a search returns nothing, that absence is information — it means the verified record holds nothing matching, not that the search failed.
Avoid typing confidential or privileged client details into the search or question boxes.
04Ask a question Paid plans
Type a question into the same box instead of keywords — was Meta fined under the DSA? — and you get a short answer built from checked summaries of the record, with every statement linked to the document it came from. Press any citation to open that document and check it yourself.
You can also ask from a development you are already reading: press Ask on any post or record and the question box opens with that document in view. Answers can be shared or copied with their citations intact. Nothing you ask is stored.
Search or Ask — which to use
Search
You want the evidence.
You get the primary documents themselves.
Best for research, discovery, verification.
Ask
You want an answer.
You get a synthesis, with the evidence in the footnotes.
Best for understanding and orientation.
Ask answers from the record and shows its sources; where it cannot support a claim, it says so. Always open the citation before relying on an answer in client work.
05Reading a record All plans
Press any result title, or any source card in the feed, to open it.
A record open in the reader, with Details expanded.
- Title and publisher. Who published it, and where it came from.
- Details. Press it to reveal how authoritative the source is, the jurisdiction, the true publication date, the regulator, the regulatory system it belongs to, its themes, and the language it is in. In a results list these appear on the card itself; in the reader they sit behind Details so the document has the page to itself.
- The note. A short plain-language summary of the document, where one exists.
- The document. The text itself, where the publisher's terms allow us to show it — in the language it was published in, unless we hold an accepted English translation.
- Along the bottom. Source opens the official original · Find searches inside the document, with ‹ › to step through matches · Cite · Share. Where they apply, AI summary and Compare versions join them.
The linked original is always the authoritative version. Vellum gives you the verified record, the true date and the provenance — but for anything you file or advise on, open the source.
The Cite button All plans
In the reader, press Cite. A full citation is copied to your clipboard — paste it straight into a brief, memo or email.
Each citation carries the publisher, the document title, the true publication date, the Vellum record ID, the canonical source URL, and the date you accessed it. That is everything a reader needs to verify your source independently.
Translations All plans
Much of the record is not in English — Italian AGCOM rulings, German DDG material, French SREN documents. Where we hold an accepted English translation, the record is shown in English and marked as translated.
- Open a translated record. The title and text you see are the English translation.
- Press Original (Italian) ▾ — the language is named on the button.
- The original text expands below. Press again to collapse it.
The original publication is always kept alongside, and how the English was produced is shown under Details.
Version history All plans
Some documents change after publication — a consultation becomes a code, guidance gets revised. Where we hold more than one version, the record is marked Changed and a Compare versions button appears in the reader. Press it to see the chain of versions and what changed between them. If the button is not there, we hold only one version.
06Briefings Paid plans
Turn any set of results into a dated briefing with citations. Run a search, then press Summarise. To brief specific documents instead, tick their checkboxes first — the button then shows the count.
26 August 2026 — Regulator: the document's title
By regulatory system UK Online Safety Act 1
By theme Child safety & minors 1
By source The publisher 1
By authority Official 1
A briefing over the current search.
- What it answers. The query and filters you were looking at, named at the top.
- The window. Last day, 7 days (the default) or 30 days. If you set dates in the filters, your dates win.
- Two ways to write it. Assembled is built purely from what the records themselves say — dates, publishers, titles, counts, no written prose at all. With summaries adds each document's prepared summary, and says so where one does not exist rather than inventing it.
- The lead line — how many documents were published, by which kinds of body, and how recently. If nothing was published in the window, the briefing says so rather than padding.
- The breakdown — by regulatory system, theme, source and authority, so you can see the shape of the period at a glance.
Share it, export it, or make it recurring
- Share — creates a link and copies it. Paste it anywhere; LinkedIn and WhatsApp show a preview. Readers sign in free to view it.
- Export as PDF — Export → Summary — PDF opens a clean print layout; save as PDF or print.
- By email — save the search with alerts on and choose the links + summary format; the digest then carries the briefing in the email itself.
Summarise also appears on each dashboard in My Space → Coverage — the same briefing, scoped to that regulatory system.
07My Space
My Space is your own layer over the record — what you kept, what will tell you, what you marked, and who you follow. Seven sections run along the top; on a phone you can swipe between them.
The sections of My Space.
- Saved searches — open one to run it again over today's record. Never a frozen copy.
- Alerts & reminders — everything that reaches out to you.
- Events & deadlines — the events you saved and the deadlines being watched for you.
- My reports — the report comparisons you built and kept. Open one to run it again.
- Pinned — any record, under a label of your own.
- Following — the agents and regulatory systems you asked to see more of.
- Coverage — what your plan covers, and the live dashboards over it.
Pinning records under your own labels All plans
Pins are a private working layer — a place to gather everything relevant to a matter.
- On any result or post, press Save (or Pin on a computer).
- Type a label of your own: Client X · age assurance, Q4 board note, DSA Art. 34.
- To pin several at once, tick their checkboxes and use Pin in the row above the results — they are saved together under one label.
Your last-used label is remembered, so building a matter over several sessions is quick. Everything appears under My Space → Pinned, sorted by label.
Coverage and dashboards Paid plans
My Space → Coverage lists every regulatory system in the record with live counts, and opens a dashboard for each one you subscribe to: the latest developments, who is publishing, how active the last 30 and 90 days have been, a timeline by year, and how fresh each source is.
08Alerts & reminders Paid plans
Get an email when new records match a search you care about.
- Run the search you want to watch.
- Press Set up alerts, or tick alerts while saving the search.
- Choose daily or weekly, and the format: links only or links + summary.
| When | What arrives |
|---|---|
| Daily | One combined digest each morning |
| Weekly | One combined digest on Mondays |
| Nothing changed | Nothing is sent |
All your alerts arrive as a single email from alerts@vellumintel.com — not one message per search. Manage or switch them off any time from My Space → Alerts & reminders.
How many you can hold depends on your plan: up to 10 per regulatory system on an Ecosystems plan, and up to 50 on All access or Team.
09My Resources All plans
Four living lists, for the things regulatory teams check again and again.
My Resources, with the Enforcement pane's two views.
Enforcement
Fines, enforcement actions and designations across every regime, newest first. Filter by regulatory system and organisation. Switch the view between Record — the stream of actions — and Fines analysis, which totals the monetary penalties and normalises the amounts so they can be compared. From here you can also set an alert from your current filters, export to CSV, or email yourself the view.
Labels such as Action or Fine describe what the document is. They are classifications applied to source-verified records, not a legal characterisation.
Consultation deadlines
A consultation, with its countdown.
Every consultation that is open for response, soonest first, each showing who is consulting, the closing date and how many days are left. Tick the ones you want and add them to your calendar, or turn on reminders.
Deadlines are shown only where the document itself states one. We never infer a date.
Statutory reports
| Metric | Report A | Report B |
|---|---|---|
| Words | 12,183 | 100,371 |
| Headings | 168 | 1,212 |
| Quantified-claims density | 45.6 | 55.0 |
| Protection of minors | 11 | 45 |
| Recommender systems | 8 | 37 |
| Researcher data access | 0 | 36 |
| Coverage gaps | Researcher data access | — |
Two reports side by side. Figures are illustrative.
The reports platforms are required to publish — risk assessments, audit reports, audit implementation reports and transparency reports — gathered in one list.
Tick between two and eight and press Compare to put them side by side on measured rows: length, structure, how densely each one quantifies its claims, and how much space each gives to the risk categories the law names — illegal content, protection of minors, recommender systems, researcher data access, and the rest. A final row names the categories a report does not cover at all.
The comparison counts what is in the documents; it does not judge them, and every figure can be checked against the text. Save a comparison to My Space → My reports to run it again later.
Elections
Election observation reports from the EU, the OSCE/ODIHR, the Council of Europe and others, grouped into a dossier for each election: the country, the year, the type of election, and the sequence of reports from preliminary statement to final report.
Search them, or filter by observation body, jurisdiction, election type, level, report stage and year. Switch to All reports to see them as a flat list instead of grouped dossiers.
10Events Paid plans
Events are the things you can turn up to: conferences and summits, workshops and hackathons, meetings convened by regulators, and parliamentary committee sessions. If it is something you read rather than attend, it is a development and it lives in Search.
Each entry shows the organiser, what kind of gathering it is, when it is, where it is, and whether it is in person or online — as the organiser states it. Cards nearing their date are marked so. Search by organiser, or filter the list, and switch between Upcoming and All events. On any event you can Add it to your calendar, Share it, or Save it to My Space.
Your calendar All plans
Two ways to get dates out of Vellum and into your own calendar.
- Subscribe to every consultation deadline. In My Resources → Consultation deadlines, press Add to calendar and pick Google Calendar, Outlook, Apple Calendar or download the file. Your calendar then stays up to date on its own as new deadlines land.
- Add only what you choose. Tick the deadlines or events you want — the button changes to show the count — then pick your calendar. Only the ticked ones are added.
From the feed, Add on any post does the same for that one item: a stated deadline is booked as a deadline, and anything else books 45 minutes to read it.
Deadline reminders Paid plans
In Consultation deadlines, press Reminders and choose how much notice you want — 3, 7 or 14 days before. If you have filtered to one regulatory system first, the reminder follows that filter. Return to the same menu to change the notice period or turn reminders off. Reminders you have set are listed in My Space → Alerts & reminders.
11Sharing & exporting
Sharing All plans
Share copies a link to exactly what you are looking at — the same query, the same filters, the same sort. Whoever opens it sees precisely what you saw. The same menu offers email, WhatsApp, LinkedIn, X and Facebook; on a phone it also hands over to your device's own share sheet, so Teams, Outlook, Signal, Messages and Save to Files are all there.
You can share a search, a single record, a briefing, an answer or an event.
Exporting Paid plans
| Option | Use it for |
|---|---|
| Selected — CSV | Spreadsheets and internal trackers |
| Selected — JSON | Your own tools and systems |
| Summary — PDF | A briefing to circulate or file |
CSV and JSON export the records you have ticked, with the publisher included. Reuse terms travel with every export, so whoever receives it knows where they stand.
12On your phone
Vellum Search works in a phone browser exactly as it does on a computer — the same account, the same record, the same features. Feed, Search, My Space and Events sit along the bottom; My Resources and Vellum Intelligence are behind the menu at the top left.
- Swipe between the sections of My Space and My Resources.
- Appearance — Settings → Appearance offers light, dark or follow-my-device.
- Notifications — alerts arrive by email, wherever you are signed in. Set them up on any saved search.
- Add to home screen from your browser's share menu for a full-screen app.
13Plans
Every record carries its primary source, true date, publisher and authority on every plan. That is a given, never a plan feature. What a plan changes is how deep you can go and which tools you get.
| Plan | Price | What it adds |
|---|---|---|
| Free | Free forever | Search every regulatory system · 20 searches a day · top 20 results · 10 feed posts a week · read and pin records · follow agents · share anything |
| Ecosystems | Paid plan — current prices are on Pricing | On the systems you choose: full-depth results, cited answers, summaries and briefings, saved searches, up to 10 alerts each, dashboards, and exports. Other systems stay previewable. |
| All access | Paid plan — current prices are on Pricing | Everything, across every regulatory system — current and future — with one combined view and up to 50 alerts |
| Team | Paid plan — current prices are on Pricing | Five seats with full access, and a shared pin board for the team |
Annual billing gives two months free. Full detail, in plain terms, is on the pricing page.
14API & MCP Separate product
If you want the record inside your own systems, or inside an AI assistant, that is the API product. It is billed separately from your Search plan and neither changes the other.
- Create a connection key in Account.
- Add the server search.vellumintel.com/mcp with your key.
- Your assistant gains two tools: one to search the record, one to retrieve a document in full.
Usage is measured in credits, and every response tells you what it cost. Pay as you go has no base fee; the subscription includes a monthly allowance. Full endpoint, setup and billing detail is on the API & MCP page.
The machine interface needs a paid plan. Free and trial accounts can use the app fully, but not the API or MCP.
15Public pages
Some of Vellum is readable without signing in — useful for colleagues who do not have an account.
- The Wire — a free weekly briefing of what EU and UK regulators, courts and parliaments published in the last seven days, every item linked to its primary source. There is an RSS feed.
- Regulations covered — a page for every regulatory system, with live counts, the sources covered and the latest developments.
- Themes — the 22 curated themes, and what each one means.
- The homepage map — a visual view of the collected record, searchable from the same box.
16How to rely on it
- Cite the record, not the summary. Summaries and briefings are reading aids. The document is the citation.
- The linked original is authoritative. Vellum gives you the verified record, the true date and the provenance — for anything you file or advise on, open the source.
- Open the citation. An answer shows its sources so you can check them. Do.
- Nothing is invented. Where a date, a deadline or a summary does not exist, Vellum says so rather than filling the gap.
- Labels describe documents, not law. Classifications such as Action, Fine or Primary say what a document is and where it came from — never what it means legally.
17Common questions
My search returned nothing. Is it broken?
Probably not. A truthful zero is a real answer — it means nothing in the verified record matches. Try removing a filter, or widening the date range.
Why do I only see 20 results?
That is the free tier's depth. Breadth is never restricted — you can search every regulatory system on every plan — but full-depth results come with a plan.
Why can't I read the full text of some documents?
Some publishers' reuse terms do not permit us to reproduce their text. The record, the date and the provenance are always there, and Source takes you to the original.
What does the authority badge mean?
It says what kind of source the document is — a regulator's own publication, another official body, or secondary material such as commentary. It is a statement about the source, not about whether the content is correct.
Can I share a search with someone who has no account?
Yes. Anyone can open a shared link; they will be asked to sign in free to see the results.
How current is the data?
New records land through the day, and the line above your results shows when the data was last refreshed.
How do I track EU and UK consultation deadlines?
Open My Resources → Consultation deadlines. Every consultation open for response is listed soonest first, with its closing date and how many days are left. Add them to your calendar in one step, or set email reminders 3, 7 or 14 days before each one closes.
Is there one place to see EU and UK enforcement actions and fines?
My Resources → Enforcement gathers fines, enforcement actions and designations across every regulatory system in the record, newest first. A Fines analysis view totals the monetary penalties and normalises the amounts so they can be compared. Filter by regulatory system or organisation, set an alert from those filters, or export the view.
How do I get an email when a regulator publishes something new?
Run the search you want to watch, press Set up alerts, and choose a daily or weekly digest. All your alerts arrive as a single email. If nothing changed, nothing is sent.
Can an AI assistant search the regulatory record?
Yes. The API and MCP product gives an assistant two tools — one to search the record, one to retrieve a document in full — so it can answer from verified primary sources with the citation attached. It is billed separately from a Search plan; see API & MCP.
What happened to the Catalogue and Trackers tabs?
The catalogue and its dashboards moved into My Space → Coverage; the trackers became My Resources. Nothing was removed, and old links still work.
18Account & settings
Open the menu and choose Settings, or click your avatar on a computer.
- Profile & sign-in — how you sign in, and your details.
- Account & plan — what you are on, what you have used this period, billing and invoices, connection keys, and team seats.
- Appearance — light, dark or follow-my-device.
- Notifications — how alerts reach you.
- Resources & legal — privacy policy, user agreement, and this page.
Accounts left unused for 12 months are deleted; we email 30 days beforehand, and signing in keeps the account. Paid accounts are never deleted automatically.