1. Status of this document
AnswerRank publishes this notice in template form so that a prospective customer, a security reviewer or a data protection officer can read our intended commitments early. It is published for review rather than as an executed legal instrument, and nothing on this page constitutes legal advice. Effective date: [to be set on legal review].
2. Who this notice covers
It covers visitors to this website, people who run a free visibility audit, and users of the AnswerRank application. The controlling entity and its registered address are [legal entity, address, and where required an EU/UK representative].
Where a customer uses AnswerRank to process personal data inside their own workspace, that customer is the controller of that data and we act as their processor. Those obligations live in the data processing agreement.
3. Information we process
Account and organisation data
Name, email address, authentication records, organisation membership and role. This is the minimum needed to give you an account and to decide what you may see inside it.
Workspace configuration
The brands, domains, competitors, markets and prompts you choose to track, plus your settings. This is business data rather than personal data in most cases, but it is yours and is treated as confidential.
Measurement data
Answers returned by AI answer engines, the citations attached to them, the pages we crawl on the domains you ask us to audit, and the derived metrics. This data is about public web content and public AI output. It can incidentally contain personal data when a public answer or a public page mentions a person.
Free audit data
When someone runs an audit without an account we store the submitted URL, the resulting report, a hash of the access token issued to the browser, a hash of the requesting IP address, and the user agent. The IP is hashed rather than stored in the clear because we need it for abuse control, not for identification.
Billing data
Subscription state, plan and usage counts. Card details are processed by our payment provider and are never stored on our systems.
Operational telemetry
Error reports, product analytics events, and an append-only administrative audit trail of who changed what inside an organisation. Audit entries are redacted before they are written so that secrets do not enter logs. Which telemetry services are enabled depends on the deployment; they are listed on the security page.
Cookies and local storage
Session and authentication storage necessary to keep you signed in, and analytics storage where analytics is enabled. A cookie inventory and consent approach for your jurisdiction is [to be completed on legal review].
4. Why we process it
- To provide the service you asked for: running checks, analysing answers and producing reports.
- To operate accounts, organisations and access control.
- To bill subscriptions and enforce plan limits.
- To keep the service available and safe, including rate limiting and abuse prevention.
- To diagnose faults and improve the product.
- To answer your emails.
We do not sell personal data, and we do not use your workspace data to advertise to you.
5. Legal bases
Where the GDPR or a comparable regime applies, we would rely on: performance of a contract for providing the service and billing it; legitimate interests for security, abuse prevention and product improvement; consent where required for non-essential analytics; and legal obligation for records we are required to keep. The final mapping of purposes to legal bases is [to be confirmed by counsel for each jurisdiction].
6. Prompts and answer engines
This is the part most privacy notices bury, so we will be direct about it. Running a check means sending your prompt text to the third-party answer engine being measured. Those providers process the request under their own terms and privacy policies.
Consequently: do not put confidential information, credentials, or personal data about identifiable individuals into a tracked prompt. A prompt should read like a question a buyer would type, because that is what it is measuring.
8. How long we keep it
- Anonymous free audit results carry an expiry — 30 days by default — after which they are purged.
- Account, workspace and measurement data is retained while the account is active, because historical comparison is the point of the product.
- Deleting an account cascades through the schema and removes the associated records.
- Billing records and administrative audit entries are retained for the period required by applicable law: [retention period to be confirmed].
9. Your rights
Depending on where you live, you may have the right to access a copy of your personal data, correct it, delete it, receive it in a portable format, object to or restrict certain processing, withdraw consent, and complain to a supervisory authority. We will not discriminate against you for exercising these rights.
To make a request, email hello@answerrank.io with “Privacy request” in the subject. We may need to verify your identity before acting. If the data is held inside a customer workspace, we will refer your request to that customer as the controller.
10. International transfers
Our service providers and the answer engines we measure operate across multiple regions, so personal data may be transferred internationally. The transfer mechanisms relied upon, including standard contractual clauses where applicable, are [to be completed and executed on legal review].
11. Children
AnswerRank is a business tool and is not directed at children. We do not knowingly collect personal data from children. The applicable age threshold is [to be confirmed per jurisdiction].
12. Changes to this notice
We will update this page when our processing changes, and material changes will be communicated to account holders by email. Because this version is a template, it should be expected to change substantially when it is reviewed.
13. Contact
Questions about this notice go to hello@answerrank.io.
Reminder: this is an unexecuted template published for review. It is not legal advice and does not create obligations until it has been reviewed, completed and adopted.