Privacy Policy

1. What we collect

When you submit a check or buy a report we store:

• The business name, website URL, and location you submitted
• The email address you asked us to deliver results to
• The queries we generated and the responses each AI platform returned
• The IP address the submission originated from (for abuse detection)
• Timestamps of your submissions

If you buy the AI Visibility Report, payment is processed by Stripe. We receive your order details and the email address on the order. We never see or store your card number — it goes directly to Stripe and never reaches our servers.

2. What we do with it

• Deliver the citation check results you asked for.
• Send you transactional emails about your check.
• Send you occasional product-related emails (see "Marketing" below).
• Detect abuse and enforce fair-use rate limits.
• Aggregate anonymized signals to improve the product.

We do not sell report or free-check data for unrelated advertising. If you request implementation and expressly agree, we may share that request and your contact details with Leadbrew so they can contact you about implementation. We may receive payment for that referral. Declining an implementation introduction does not prevent you using the free check or report. We never share the content of your submissions with third parties for advertising. If you arrived from one of our adverts, we report that a check or purchase happened to the advertising platform so we can measure the advert (see Meta below); that report can carry a hashed email and ad measurement identifiers, never your business details or report results.

3. Third-party services we use

• Stripe — processes payments. Card details go directly to Stripe and never touch our servers.
• Resend — delivers your transactional and marketing emails.
• Meta (Facebook) — ad measurement only. A Meta pixel records page views, and when you run a check or buy a report we send Meta a SHA-256 hash of your email so the advert that brought you can be credited. No submission content or results are sent.
• Neon — hosts our Postgres database.
• Vercel — hosts our website and runs the check workload.
• OpenAI, Anthropic, Perplexity, Google, xAI — receive the generated queries in order to return AI responses. A query is a question a customer might ask, such as “best auto repair shop in Fresno”; some name your business and most do not.
• Anthropic, additionally — reads each answer to decide whether it refers to you, and to do that it is sent your business name and website URL alongside the answer. That is more than the query alone contains, and it applies to every answer we classify.
• The AI model providers do not receive your email address. It is never included in a query, a classification, or any other request we make to a model provider.

4. Website and advertising measurement

We use first-party anonymous browser identifiers (up to 90 days) and sessions (30 minutes of inactivity) to understand which adverts bring visits, which public pages and sections are viewed, and where people start or leave checkout. We record named button actions, scroll depth, visible-page time, device category, country and the referring site. We do not record keystrokes, private form contents, session video or private report access tokens in visitor analytics. These identifiers describe a browser, not a verified person.

When you submit an order, the measurement identifiers and ad labels are attached to that order so we can connect the visit with confirmed payment and report delivery. Meta receives its browser and click identifiers, browser information, event details and a hashed email for conversion measurement. Hashing does not make an email anonymous. We keep visitor event history for up to 90 days; order and accounting records follow the retention periods below.

You can disable optional measurement for this browser below. We also honour Global Privacy Control for optional visitor and advertising measurement. Essential payment, fraud prevention and delivery records remain necessary to fulfil your order.

5. Marketing emails

New free checks only generate the status and results emails you request. They do not automatically enrol you in marketing emails. Any separately opted-in marketing email includes an unsubscribe link. You can also unsubscribe by replying to any email from us.

6. Data retention

Free-check submissions are retained for up to 24 months to enable trend analysis and re-checks. Paid-audit records are retained for 7 years for accounting and tax purposes. You may request deletion of your data at any time by emailing hello@citationchecks.com.

7. Your rights

Depending on where you live you may have the right to access, correct, delete, or export your personal data, or to object to certain processing. To exercise any of these rights, email hello@citationchecks.com.

8. Contact

Privacy questions or concerns: hello@citationchecks.com.