Privacy Policy

The short version

We keep what a scan or a report needs and little else: the business you asked about, what the AI assistants said, your email address and, if you pay, a record of the payment. A full report is kept for six months, a free scan for 30 days. We do not sell data, and we do not build advertising profiles.

What we collect

Business information. The public details on your Google listing, if you have one: name, address, phone number, website, categories, opening hours, rating, review count, number of photos and map location. And what we read on your public website: the services you list, whether your name, address and phone number on it match your listing, and the files that tell search engines and AI tools about your site (structured data, robots.txt, sitemap, llms.txt).

AI answers. What each AI assistant said when we asked it a customer’s question, and the websites it cited. These answers are about a market, not about you, so one answer is reused for every business we check that day with the same question in the same city. That is what keeps the service affordable.

Account details. Your email address, held by Clerk, which runs our sign-in. You sign in with Google or with a code we email you; we never see or store a password. If you sign in with Google, Clerk also receives the name and picture on your Google account. If you pay for a report without an account, we create one for the email address you paid with and send it a sign-in link.

Payment details. Handled entirely by Dodo Payments. We never see your card number. Dodo sends us a record of each payment, which we keep: a payment reference, the amount, your name and email address, your billing address, and card details such as its brand and last four digits.

A scrambled form of your internet address. To stop one visitor running up unlimited free scans, we count scans and searches per internet (IP) address per day. We store the address only as a salted SHA-256 hash, never the address itself. The salt is a secret added before scrambling; without it, anyone could work the hash back to the address in seconds by trying every possible one. We keep the count for the day and no longer.

What we do not collect

No advertising trackers, no cross-site profiling, no fingerprinting for marketing. We count page visits two ways. Cloudflare Web Analytics sets no cookies and does not follow you to other sites. Google Analytics, on our public pages only, tells us which pages people read and where they came from. It does not run on your report, your dashboard or the pages you sign in on. Before a free scan runs, Cloudflare Turnstile checks that a person, not a program, is asking.

Cookies

Most cookies here are the ones the site needs to work. Clerk sets the ones that keep you signed in. atb_claim lasts 30 days and links a scan you ran signed out to the account you create next. Cloudflare may set one for its bot check. None of these need your permission.

On our public pages, Google Analytics sets _ga cookies, which last up to two years, so it can tell a returning visitor from a new one. If your device is set to a time zone in Europe, including the UK, or your browser hides its time zone, Google Analytics stays off until you say yes. Elsewhere it runs unless you say no. Either way, Cookie settings at the foot of the page lets you change your mind, and saying no removes those cookies. We remember your choice in your browser. None of these cookies follow you to other sites or are used for advertising.

Why we are allowed to hold it

To provide the service you asked for, to take payment for it, and to protect the service from abuse. Where we email you about the product, it is because you gave us your address to receive a report. If we emailed you first, see If we emailed you below.

Who we share it with

Only the companies that make the product run: Neon (database), Clerk (accounts and sign-in), Cloudflare (hosting, bot checks and visit counts), Dodo Payments (payment), Resend (the emails we send about your scans and reports), Google Places (looking up business listings), Google Analytics (visits to our public pages) and Google Workspace (our email and the outreach spreadsheet).

And the AI companies. We put the questions a customer would ask to OpenAI, Anthropic and Perplexity through OpenRouter, and to Google directly. The questions are about a market, not about you personally. To read the answers and your website, we use AI models from Anthropic, through OpenRouter, and from TypeSafe; they see your business’s name, the answers, and what your website says.

How long we keep it

A full report, including each monthly re-check, is kept for six months from the day it finishes, and a free scan for 30 days. If it is on your account, we email you 7 days before it is deleted, and for a full report 30 days before as well. You can delete a report sooner yourself, from My reports in your dashboard.

Deleting a report does not delete your business’s profile: its public details, the questions we wrote for it and our notes on each answer stay, so a later scan does not start from scratch. AI answers are not deleted with a report either; they are about a market, not about you, and are kept as a record of it. Rate-limit counts are kept for a day. Payment records are kept as long as tax law requires.

Your rights

Ask us for a copy of your data, a correction, or deletion, and we will act on it. To close your account, ask us; that deletes your business profiles, scans and reports. Shared AI answers are not personal data about you and remain as market history.

If we emailed you

We email businesses we think could use a report. If you got one, this is what we did and what we hold.

Where your address came from. We found your business through its Google listing, and your email address on your own website, where your business publishes it. We do not buy lists or guess addresses.

What we hold. Your business name, website, city, country and trade; the email address your site publishes, the page we found it on and the date; a first name, if the address is a person’s own (such as jane@); a one-line summary of our free scan, if we ran one; and when we wrote and whether you replied. These sit in a spreadsheet in our Google Workspace. A free scan run this way makes no report and no account; its AI answers join the shared answers described above.

Why we are allowed to. We have a legitimate interest in telling a business about a service that is relevant to it, and you can opt out at any time.

How long we keep it. If you never reply, we delete your details within 12 months.

Stopping it. Reply “no” and we stop. We keep your address on a do-not-contact list, only so we never email it again. To have even that removed, or to see what we hold, get in touch.

Contact

Answer the Business is run by Shaik Arif Hussain, in India. Privacy questions or a deletion request: get in touch.