Privacy Policy

CiteLocal helps local businesses measure and improve how AI assistants (like ChatGPT and Google's AI Overviews) represent them. This policy explains what we collect, why, who we share it with, and the choices you have. It is provided for transparency and is not legal advice.

Account information: your email, business name, and city, plus a securely hashed password. We never store your password in readable form.

Business facts you provide: details you enter or correct about your business (phone, hours, services) so we can check whether AI states them accurately.

Scan data: the businesses you scan (yours and any competitors you add), and the AI answers and cited sources we collect about them over time. This visibility record is the core of the service.

Public business data: we look up publicly available information about your business (for example your Google Business Profile, ratings, and reviews) through the third-party services listed below.

Billing: payments are processed by Stripe. We do not see or store your full card number.

Usage and device data: a login token stored in your browser to keep you signed in, and basic usage/diagnostic data to operate and improve the product.

Outreach data: for cold outreach to prospective customers we use publicly available business contact information and record email engagement (such as opens and clicks). Every outreach email includes an unsubscribe link and a postal address, and we honor opt-outs.

To run scans, monitor your AI-search visibility, generate remediation guidance and reports, and flag inaccurate AI answers about you.

To operate your account, process subscriptions, and provide support.

To improve the product, including aggregated and de-identified analysis of scan outcomes.

For cold outreach to prospective customers, on the basis of legitimate interest and in compliance with applicable email law — always with a working unsubscribe.

We share the minimum data needed with providers that help us run the service: OpenAI and Anthropic (to query and reason over AI answers), SerpApi (to read Google results and business-profile data), Stripe (payments), our email/SMTP provider (transactional and outreach email), and our hosting provider (Render). These providers process data on our behalf under their own terms. We do not sell your personal information.

If you create a shareable report link, anyone with that link can view that scan's visibility data (your score, the surfaces scanned, and the sources cited) without logging in. The link contains a long, random token and can be revoked by you at any time, which immediately disables it. Do not share the link with anyone you don't want to see the report.

We keep your account and scan data while your account is active so we can show visibility trends and before/after lift. You can ask us to delete your account and associated personal data; we will do so except where we must retain limited records for legal, security, or billing reasons.

You can access and correct your business information from your account, unsubscribe from outreach at any time, and request access to or deletion of your personal data by emailing us. Depending on where you live, you may have additional rights under laws such as the GDPR or CCPA; we honor valid requests under those laws.

We protect data with encryption in transit, hashed passwords, scoped access controls so each account only reaches its own data, and revocable tokens for shared links. No system is perfectly secure, but we work to safeguard your information and to limit what we collect to what the service needs.

CiteLocal is a business tool and is not directed to children under 18, and we do not knowingly collect their personal information.

We may update this policy as the product evolves. Material changes will be reflected here with a new effective date.

Questions, access requests, or deletion requests: email jsahasi@gmail.com. A postal address is included in our outreach emails and available on request.