Privacy Policy

We collect the following categories of information:

• Account information: the email address and authentication details used to sign in.
• Workspace inputs: the business name, website, services, areas, confirmed facts and enquiry goals you enter. Earlier workspaces may also contain competitor records.
• Connected integrations: access tokens you choose to connect (for example Google Search Console, GitHub, or a CMS). These are encrypted server-side and shown back to you only as labels.
• Usage data: scans, audits, actions, and related activity generated as you use the product.
• Optional private quality reviews: saved answers and supporting fact references, human assessments, disagreement resolutions and the permissions recorded for that review and evaluation.

We use the information above to:

• provide and operate the service, including scans and GEO audits;
• generate evidence-backed actions and verify their results;
• secure accounts, prevent abuse, and meet legal obligations;
• communicate with you about your account and the service.

We do not sell your personal information.

The service-business AEO workflow keeps each business’s evidence, reviews and enquiry records within its authorized scope. It does not automatically contribute those records to cross-customer learning.

Earlier workspaces may have separately configured contribution settings. Those historical choices remain subject to their recorded purpose, policy and withdrawal controls; they are not enabled by creating a service-business workspace.

Visits from AI answers: on a MakeTrend-hosted answers page, and on a WordPress site where the MakeTrend plugin counts visits, we keep only the day, the assistant, the page and the number of visits that arrived from a link in an AI answer. We do not store an IP address, a cookie, a referrer address or anything that identifies a visitor.

A website check reads a bounded selection of public pages and retains limited page text, status and findings. Anonymous results are tied to a browser cookie and expire after 24 hours. Saving an inspection requires authenticated business access.

Checks from an AI assistant: when you ask ChatGPT, Claude or another assistant to use MakeTrend, it sends us the website address you gave it. We keep the result for 24 hours, tied to a random key instead of a browser cookie. We do not ask for or keep your chat, your name or your assistant account. A one-way hash of the network address the request came from limits abuse and is not stored with the result.

When you run the free website check we record, for counting only, the country your request came from (as reported by our hosting provider) and your browser’s preferred language (for example “de”). We do not store your IP address with it, and these counts are kept per month without the website address.

When you buy a plan, Stripe collects your billing address and, if you enter one, your business tax ID, so they appear on your invoices.

Enquiry imports accept source event identifiers, enquiry identifiers, event stages, times, qualification and optional service, area, referral and job-value fields. Contact names, email addresses, telephone numbers and private message-body columns are not part of the supported import format.

We rely on the following third parties to run the product. Each receives only the data needed for its function.

When you ask MakeTrend to prepare or check an improvement, its customer question, relevant confirmed business facts and proposed wording are processed through OpenAI’s API for drafting and a separate grounding check. Account credentials, provider tokens and enquiry rows are excluded. We request that responses are not stored as Responses API application state; this does not disable OpenAI’s separate abuse-monitoring retention. MakeTrend does not opt this content into provider model training.

Private workflow evidence records proposal, review and public-verification events using content fingerprints, counts and provenance. These records are retained for up to 180 days; evaluation snapshots expire after 30 days. A review decision is not treated as proof of factual correctness, and a verified publication is not treated as proof of AI recommendation or commercial impact.

Optional private quality review separately records the saved answer and its supporting evidence, explicit human judgments and any authorized resolution of disagreement. Review cases and judgments are retained for up to 180 days; their evaluation reports and dataset snapshots expire after 30 days. This use requires the recorded permission for that case. Publication approval is not a quality judgment, and neither private review nor evaluation automatically authorizes cross-business use or provider model training.

Cross-business learning is off by default. An owner or administrator can separately choose governed anonymous aggregates or minimized recommendation-learning records in Data controls when the corresponding policy is available. Shared records exclude business wording, prompts, customer details and credentials. Withdrawing consent stops future sharing and revokes applicable evaluation snapshots; business deletion also removes the underlying records. This preference never authorizes training a provider model.

Service-AEO anonymous checks expire after 24 hours; temporary import rows normally expire after seven days. Raw inspected page text and answer bodies are retained for 90 days. Normalized observation and enquiry history and completed improvement/publication history use a 12-month retention window.

Current business facts and evidence still needed by active work remain available while that work is active. A business owner can request deletion with a seven-day cancellation window. Cancellation ends at the displayed deadline or when erasure starts, whichever comes first. Cleanup removes the business’s content, review links and connection credentials in bounded jobs; separate payer, necessary security and payment-processor records may remain. Ending a business does not automatically cancel a separate subscription.

Protected minimal revocation, erasure and security-recovery markers are normally retained for 730 days to prevent withdrawn access or deleted information from being reactivated during recovery. They contain keyed fingerprints, event types, times and integrity proofs, not raw account identifiers, email addresses, credentials, answer text or human judgments. Their cleanup is bounded and verified. While secure cleanup or recovery verification is pending, affected data remains restricted; an unknown result is not treated as immediate or completed erasure.

Earlier workspaces retain their separately configured retention controls. Backup expiry and legally required payment retention follow the applicable provider and account policies.

Private business data is scoped by business roles or an exact verified-recipient review grant on backend reads and writes. Connected secrets are encrypted at rest and are never returned to the browser in plain text.

You may request access to, correction of, or deletion of your personal information, and you may disconnect any integration at any time from Settings. To make a request, contact us using the address below.

We may update this policy as the product evolves. Material changes will be reflected by the date at the top of this page.

Questions about this policy can be sent to contact@maketrend.ai.