Privacy Policy
cite0 measures where a local business shows up in AI answers and helps fix the signals behind them. To do that we hold a small amount of information about you (the person with the account) and a larger amount about your business, most of which is already public. This page says what we collect, why, who processes it on our behalf, how long we keep it, and what you can ask us to do with it.
The short version: we collect what the product needs and nothing for its own sake; we never sell personal information or hand it to advertisers; we use well-known providers to run the service and name every one of them below; and you can see, correct, export or delete what we hold about you by emailing hello@cite0.ai.
This policy covers cite0.ai, app.cite0.ai, the free AI visibility scan, and the emails we send. It is written for Canada's Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act (PIPEDA) and the anti-spam law (CASL); if you are elsewhere, the same commitments apply.
Six kinds of information, each tied to something you did or asked for.
Your email address and, if you give it, your name. There is no password: you sign in with a one-time code sent to your email, or with Google. If you use Google, we receive your email, name and profile picture from your Google account and nothing else — we ask only for the openid, email and profile scopes.
What you tell us when you join the waitlist, book a demo or set up the product: business name, category, neighbourhood, website, and the Google listing you pick from our type-ahead (its address and Google place id). We add public data about that listing — rating, review count, hours, categories — from Google and our data providers.
Optional, and each one is a separate choice:
- Google Business Profile — a token that lets us read your profile (reviews, questions, posts, details) and, when you approve a fix, write to it. See § 5.
- Your website — a Cloudflare API token you create and scope yourself, your server logs, or a small tag, so we can count visits from AI crawlers by bot and by page.
Connection credentials are stored encrypted and deleted the moment you disconnect.
Pages, answers, posts or review replies you paste in to be scored or rewritten, and the drafts we produce from them. Review text we read from your profile to classify sentiment.
Server logs with your IP address, browser, the pages and API calls you made, errors, and a random per-tab session id so we can see what someone was doing when something broke. On the marketing site, analytics as described in § 6.
Your plan, its status and your Stripe customer id. Card numbers never reach us — Stripe collects and stores them on its own pages.
Most of what the product shows is about businesses, not people, and it comes from public sources.
We ask ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews the questions your customers ask ("best med spa in Yorkville") and record which businesses they name, in what order, citing which sources. Those prompts describe a category and an area. They contain nothing about you or your account.
Names, addresses, ratings, review counts, categories and websites of businesses in a market, from Google and licensed data providers. This is the same information anyone sees on a map. We keep it as market data; it describes businesses, and we do not use it to build profiles of individuals.
You may see your business named in a report or a free scan because an AI engine named it. We show what the engine said and what is already public. If you would rather not appear in our published research, write to us and we will remove you from it.
Only for these purposes. If we ever want to use your information for something not on this list, we will ask first.
Sign you in, measure your visibility, score your site and profile, draft fixes you asked for, apply the ones you approve, and show you the results.
Charge the plan you chose, send receipts and account emails, and answer when you write to us.
Detect abuse, rate-limit, debug errors, and understand which parts of the product are used so we can improve them.
Keep the billing records tax law requires, honour unsubscribe and deletion requests, and respond to lawful requests from authorities.
We do not sell personal information, share it with advertisers, or give it to anyone who is not on this list. Each provider sees only what its job needs, under a contract that limits it to that job.
- Supabase — the database and sign-in system, hosted in the United States.
- Render — runs the cite0 engine.
- Vercel — serves cite0.ai and the app, with cookieless page-view counts.
- Cloudflare — DNS, and the Turnstile check that protects our sign-in form from bots.
- Resend — delivers sign-in codes and account emails from mail.cite0.ai.
- Stripe — collects payment, stores card details, and runs the billing portal.
- Sign in with Google — if you choose it.
- Business Profile API — if you connect your profile (§ 5).
- Places API — the business type-ahead on our forms.
- Google Analytics — on the marketing site only (§ 6).
- DataForSEO — search demand and business-listing data for a category and area. Receives no account data.
- OpenAI, Anthropic and Google (Gemini) — the models that read AI answers, classify review sentiment, score content and write drafts. Each call sends only the text that job needs. We use their business APIs, and we do not use your information to train models.
- PostHog — error and performance telemetry from the engine.
Two separate permissions, and you can withdraw either at any time.
"Continue with Google" gives us your email, name and profile picture so we can create or find your account. We do not read your Gmail, contacts, calendar or anything else.
If you connect it, you grant the business.manage permission. We use it to read your reviews, questions, posts and profile details so we can score them and draft fixes, and to publish a fix only when you click approve. We never post, reply or change anything on your profile on our own.
cite0's use of information received from Google APIs adheres to the Google API Services User Data Policy, including its Limited Use requirements. We use Google data only to provide the features you see, never for advertising, and we do not sell it or let humans read it except with your consent, for security, or as the law requires.
Disconnect from the Integrations page in the app, or remove cite0 at myaccount.google.com/permissions. Either one deletes the stored token immediately.
The app sets only the cookies that keep you signed in. The marketing site uses analytics, one of which sets cookies.
- cite0_session and cite0_refresh — keep you signed in. Secure, same-site, not readable by scripts.
- cite0.session — a random id in your tab's session storage, sent only to our own API, cleared when the tab closes.
- Turnstile — Cloudflare's bot check on the sign-in form may set its own cookie on that page.
- Stripe — sets cookies on its checkout and billing pages for fraud prevention.
- Google Analytics 4 — counts visits and pages. It sets
_gacookies and sends your IP and browser details to Google. Block it with your browser's settings or Google's opt-out add-on; the site works the same without it. - Vercel Web Analytics — page-view counts with no cookies and no cross-site identifier.
No advertising cookies, no retargeting pixels, no fingerprinting, no social-media trackers. We do not sell or share browsing data.
We sometimes write to local businesses whose AI visibility we have measured. Here is where your address came from and how to stop us.
Your business's public listing or website — the address you publish for customers to reach you — through Google or our listing-data provider. We hold the business's name, address, phone, website and that public email, and the scan we ran about it.
CASL allows a first message to a conspicuously published business address when the message relates to that business. We send one from a person's own mailbox, about your business, and we record the basis for each one.
Reply with "unsubscribe", or write to hello@cite0.ai. We mark the address and the business as do-not-contact, keep that record so we honour it, and never write again — including from other locations of the same business.
As long as it does the job it was collected for, then it goes.
For as long as your account is open. When you close it or ask us to delete it, we delete or anonymize it within 30 days, and it leaves our backups within 30 days after that.
Deleted immediately when you disconnect, revoke the permission at Google, or close your account.
Server logs and error telemetry: 90 days. Marketing-site analytics: Google Analytics keeps its event data for the period set in our account, which is its shortest option (two months).
Seven years, because Canadian tax law requires it. Stripe keeps its own records under its own policy.
Twelve months if you never open an account, then deleted.
AI answers and public listing data are kept as market history so trends can be shown over time. They describe businesses and public sources, not individuals.
Encryption in transit everywhere, encryption at rest for the things that would hurt most if they leaked, and as few people and systems with access as the job allows.
Every connection to cite0 uses HTTPS. Connection credentials for your Google profile and website are encrypted at rest with a key that lives outside the database, so a database leak alone does not expose them. Sign-in uses one-time codes or Google, so there is no password of yours for us to lose. Staff access to production is limited and logged.
We are a Canadian company, and our database and most of the providers in § 4 are in the United States, so your information is stored and processed there and is subject to the laws of that country. Each provider is bound by contract to protect it to a standard comparable to this policy.
If a breach creates a real risk of significant harm to you, we will tell you and the Privacy Commissioner as soon as feasible, as PIPEDA requires, and say what happened and what we are doing about it.
Email hello@cite0.ai from the address on your account. We answer within 30 days, and there is no fee.
Ask what we hold about you and we will send it. Tell us something is wrong and we will fix it.
Ask for a copy of your account data and the measurements about your business in a machine-readable format.
Close your account and we delete it on the schedule in § 8. We keep only what the law makes us keep (billing records) and the do-not-contact record if you asked for one.
Disconnect a Google or website connection at any time; unsubscribe from any email with one reply; block analytics in your browser. Withdrawing may mean a feature stops working, and we will say which.
If you are not satisfied with our answer, you can complain to the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada.
Who this is for, how it changes, and who to write to.
cite0 is a tool for people who run or market a business. It is not directed at anyone under 18, and we do not knowingly collect information from them. If you believe we have, write to us and we will delete it.
When we change it we update the date at the top. If a change affects what we collect or who we share it with, we email account holders before it takes effect.
cite0 · Toronto, Ontario, Canada
hello@cite0.ai
Put "privacy" in the subject and it reaches the person responsible for this policy.