Privacy Policy

We collect the information you or your AI agent give us, and information created when you use the Services. This may include:

• Account details: name, company name, email address, and phone number.
• Sign-in details: if you sign in with Google, Google tells us your name, email address, and Google account ID. We never see your Google password.
• Business details: business name, website, description, industry, country, and language.
• Audit data: the questions asked, the answers AI models gave, the sources they cited, and the results of checks on your website.
• Agent and API usage: API keys issued to your agents, and which tools or endpoints they call.
• Billing details: purchases, credit balance, and payment status. Card details are handled by Stripe; we do not store full card numbers.
• Technical data: IP address (used for rate limits and abuse prevention), browser type, and device information.
• Error reports: when something breaks, we record what went wrong, the page or request involved, your browser and device, and your account ID, so we can fix it.
• Alert settings: if you have re-check alerts sent to a webhook, the URL you give us and the secret we use to sign each alert.

• Run audits, produce reports and recommendations, and operate your account.
• Process payments, credits, and refunds.
• Respond to inquiries and provide customer support.
• Prevent fraud and abuse, including limits on free and agent-created audits.
• Improve, maintain, and optimize our Site and Services.
• Research what makes websites get cited by AI, using anonymized audit data (see section 3).
• Communicate with you about our services, offerings, and updates.
• Analyze Site traffic and usage trends.

Every audit, free or paid, contributes to our research on how AI models choose which websites to cite. When we save audit data for research, we remove your account and business identifiers. We may keep the public web pages and site addresses involved, since the research studies those pages.

Anonymized research data is kept indefinitely and is not deleted when your account is deleted. Because it cannot be linked back to you, there is no option to exclude your audits from research. We may use the findings in our product, in paid offerings, and in published studies, but we will not identify you as a Cited customer without your permission.

We use Google Analytics, loaded through Google Tag Manager, to help us understand how visitors use our Site. Google Analytics uses cookies to collect information such as pages visited, time spent, and referring websites. Where the law requires your consent, our cookie banner asks for it before any analytics cookies are set, and you can change your choice at any time from the cookie settings link in the footer. Cookies needed to sign you in and keep the Site working are always on. You can learn more about how Google uses your data here:

We may share information only when necessary to:

• Comply with legal obligations or law-enforcement requests.
• Protect the rights, property, or safety of Cited, our users, or others.
• Work with trusted service providers who help us run the Services and are bound by confidentiality obligations. These include AI model providers (such as OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic) and the gateways we reach them through (such as Vercel AI Gateway, AWS Bedrock, and OpenRouter), which receive your audit questions and business details; web data and crawling providers (such as Bright Data and Firecrawl), which fetch public pages and search results, including Google's AI Overviews and AI Mode answers for your audit questions; Google, if you sign in with Google; Sentry, which stores our error reports; Stripe for payments; cloud hosting providers; and analytics providers.
• Send re-check alerts to a webhook URL you set. The alert goes to that address, and what happens to it there is up to whoever runs it.

Cited offers an MCP (Model Context Protocol) server that allows AI assistants such as Claude, ChatGPT, and similar tools to interact with our platform on your behalf. When you use an MCP integration:

• Data you submit through the AI assistant — including business names, URLs, and audit parameters — is transmitted to Cited's servers to fulfill your requests.
• The AI assistant provider (e.g., Anthropic, OpenAI) may collect metadata about tool calls, including parameter names and values, as part of their own telemetry and product-improvement processes. This collection is governed by the assistant provider's privacy policy, not ours.
• Cited does not control or have access to telemetry collected by third-party AI assistant providers.
• An AI agent may create an account for you, optionally giving us your email address so we can send you the claim link. Unclaimed agent-created accounts are deleted after 7 days.
• Audit results, recommendations, and other data returned through MCP integrations are subject to the same data-retention and security practices described in this Policy.

We keep account, business, and audit information while your account is active, and as long as necessary to comply with legal requirements (such as keeping billing records) or resolve disputes. Accounts created by an AI agent and not claimed within 7 days are deleted. Anonymized research data is kept indefinitely, as described in section 3.

You can delete your account yourself in your account settings. Deleting it removes your account, businesses, question sets, reports, fixes, API keys, and alert settings within 30 days. We keep billing records for as long as the law requires, and anonymized research data as described in section 3. Error reports are deleted automatically after 90 days.

We maintain administrative, technical, and physical safeguards designed to protect your information from unauthorized access, alteration, or disclosure. However, no online system is completely secure, and we cannot guarantee absolute protection.

Depending on your jurisdiction (e.g., under GDPR or CCPA), you may have the right to:

• Access, correct, or delete your personal information.
• Object to or restrict processing of your data.
• Request data portability.

If you access the Site from outside the United States, you consent to the transfer and processing of your information in the U.S., which may have different data-protection laws than your country.

We may update this Privacy Policy from time to time to reflect changes in our practices or legal requirements. The revised version will be posted with an updated “Last Updated” date.

If you have questions about this Privacy Policy or our data practices, please contact us:

Cited Inc.

Email: info@youcited.com

Website: https://youcited.com