This Privacy Policy explains what information CiteHawk collects, why we collect it, who we share it with, and the choices and rights you have. We have written it to describe what our platform actually does, in plain terms wherever the law allows.
1. Who we are
CiteHawk (the "Service") is operated by ScaleUp Teams Pty Ltd (ABN 58 689 259 989), an Australian proprietary limited company registered in Western Australia, Australia, trading as CiteHawk ("we", "us", or "our"). We are the data controller for the personal information described in this Policy, except where we act as a processor on behalf of our business customers (see Section 11). You can reach us about privacy at hello@citehawk.com.
2. The short version
- We collect what we need to run the Service: your account details, your billing relationship through Stripe, the monitoring you configure, and the data we generate for you.
- To monitor AI search platforms for you, we send the prompts you configure to third-party AI providers and store the responses.
- We use a number of service providers ("subprocessors") to deliver the Service. Section 6 lists them all.
- We do not sell your personal information. Optional analytics run only if you accept cookies.
- You can access, correct, export, or delete your data. Deleting your account starts a 90-day countdown to permanent erasure of your personal data.
3. Information we collect
3.1 Account and profile data
When you create an account we collect your name, email address, and authentication credentials (passwords are stored only as salted hashes by our authentication provider, never in plain text). You may also add a profile photo. We record team membership and roles within your workspaces.
3.2 Billing data
Payments are processed by Stripe. We do not receive or store your full card number. From Stripe we receive your subscription status, billing history, and limited payment-method details (such as the card brand and last four digits) for display. Your name, email, and billing address are held by Stripe as part of your customer record.
3.3 Monitoring you configure
We store the brands, domains, prompts, markets, and competitors you set up for monitoring, together with the settings of each workspace.
3.4 AI platform responses
To measure your visibility, we send the prompts you configure to AI search platforms through their APIs and store what they return: the full response text, cited sources, the model and version used, timestamps, and our analysis (mentions, sentiment, citation and visibility scores). Because prompts and AI responses are open-ended, they may occasionally contain personal information; please avoid entering personal data you do not need to monitor.
3.5 Website audit data
Our GEO audit feature fetches and analyses web pages at a domain you provide, including page content, headings, metadata, structured data, and files such as robots.txt, sitemap.xml, and llms.txt. You are responsible for ensuring you own, control, or have permission to audit any domain you submit (see our Terms of Service). We store the audit results in your workspace.
3.6 Competitive intelligence
When AI platforms mention other brands in response to your prompts, we automatically record those brands and domains and compute comparative metrics (such as share of voice). This information concerns companies and domains, not individuals, and is used to build your competitive leaderboards.
3.7 Data from our widget and beacon
If you install our embeddable widget or tracking beacon on your own website, we receive information about activity on your site: for the widget, the query text, the referring page URL, the AI platform clicked, and the visitor's user-agent string; for the beacon, the AI crawler name, the page path visited, and the user-agent string. This data is collected on your behalf and stored in your workspace. You are responsible for informing your own visitors about this collection in your site's privacy notice (see our Terms of Service).
3.8 Usage, device, and analytics data
We collect information about how the Service is used (pages viewed, features used, and timestamps) to operate, secure, and improve it. With your consent, our analytics provider also collects standard web analytics (including your approximate location and device or browser information). We do not store IP addresses in our application database; however, our hosting, security (rate-limiting), and analytics providers process IP addresses transiently to deliver and protect the Service.
On public AI Index pages we count, for each brand, how often its listing is seen, its page is opened and its website link is clicked. With each count we keep only the country, the kind of site the visit came from (for example a search engine or an AI model) and whether the device is a phone or a computer, as daily totals. We never store your IP address, the address of the page you came from, or anything that identifies you, and a brand that has claimed its listing sees only these totals.
3.9 Communications and support
If you contact us, complete a form, or receive our emails, we keep a record of that correspondence and your communication preferences.
3.10 Google user data (Search Console and Analytics integrations)
If you connect Google Search Console or Google Analytics 4 to a workspace, we ask Google for read-only access using the webmasters.readonly and analytics.readonly OAuth scopes. With that permission we read, for the properties you select: from Search Console, daily query and page performance data (queries, clicks, impressions, and positions); and from Google Analytics, aggregate daily report data such as sessions and conversions by channel and referring source. We never read user-level or event-level Analytics data, and we cannot change anything in your Google account.
We use this data solely to provide the features you see in your dashboard: comparing your classic search visibility with your AI-answer visibility, and showing the sessions your site receives from AI models such as ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini. The OAuth tokens Google issues us are stored encrypted at rest, and the imported data is stored per workspace and shown only to that workspace's members. We do not sell Google user data, do not use it for advertising, do not use it to train AI or machine-learning models, and do not transfer it to third parties except the infrastructure subprocessors in Section 6 as needed to operate the Service, for security purposes, or to comply with applicable law. Our staff do not access this data except with your permission, for security purposes, or where required by law.
CiteHawk's use and transfer to any other app of information received from Google APIs will adhere to the Google API Services User Data Policy, including the Limited Use requirements.
You can disconnect either integration at any time from your workspace settings under Integrations. Disconnecting stops syncing, deletes the stored tokens and keeps the Google data already imported in your workspace. To remove CiteHawk's access entirely, revoke it from your Google Account at myaccount.google.com/permissions.
4. How we use your information
We use the information we collect to:
- provide, maintain, secure, and improve the Service;
- process your subscription and payments;
- run the monitoring you configure and generate reports, scores, and recommendations;
- send transactional messages (confirmations, receipts, alerts, and service notices);
- send product and marketing emails, where permitted (you can opt out at any time using the unsubscribe link in those emails);
- respond to your requests and provide support;
- detect, prevent, and address fraud, abuse, and security issues;
- comply with our legal obligations and enforce our agreements.
Where the GDPR or UK GDPR applies, we rely on the following legal bases: performance of our contract with you (to provide the Service and billing); our legitimate interests (to secure and improve the Service and to send related marketing, balanced against your rights); your consent (for optional analytics cookies and, where required, marketing); and compliance with legal obligations.
5. Cookies and similar technologies
We use a small number of cookies and local-storage items. Strictly necessary items keep you signed in and remember preferences (for example, your authentication session, sidebar state, onboarding status, and theme). These are required for the Service to function.
Optional analytics cookies (Google Analytics) load only after you accept them in the consent banner shown on your first visit. If you reject them, we do not load analytics and we clear the related cookies. You can change your choice at any time from the Cookie settings link in the footer of every page.
If you arrive through a CiteHawk partner link, a referral cookie set by our affiliate platform (Rewardful) records that partner for 90 days so the partner offer is honoured at checkout and the partner is credited. It is strictly necessary to the offer you clicked, it loads whether or not you accept analytics cookies, and it holds a referral id only, never your name or email.
6. How we share information and our subprocessors
We do not sell your personal information. We share data only with service providers that help us run the Service, each bound to protect it and use it only on our instructions. Our subprocessors are:
- Hosting and infrastructure: Vercel (application hosting and delivery), Supabase (database and authentication), and Upstash (background job queue and rate-limiting).
- Payments: Stripe (subscription billing and payment processing).
- Email: Resend (transactional and marketing email delivery).
- Customer relationship management: GoHighLevel (LeadConnector) (customer relationship management for trials, onboarding and account status).
- AI and search platforms: OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, DeepSeek, xAI, and Perplexity (to generate monitoring data from your prompts), SearchApi (receives search queries derived from your prompts, to retrieve Google AI Overviews, Google AI Mode and Bing Copilot results; a US company with its data infrastructure in the US), and SerpAPI (a fallback provider for the same results, where enabled).
- SEO and web data: DataForSEO (search and ranking data, and search queries derived from your prompts, to retrieve Google AI Overviews and Google AI Mode results) and Browserless (rendering pages for audit screenshots).
- Analytics and monitoring: Google Analytics (optional, consent-gated), Sentry (error and performance monitoring), and Vercel Analytics and Speed Insights (performance metrics).
- Productivity: Google (optional export of your data to a Google Sheet you control, and public entity lookups).
We also query public reference sources (such as Wikipedia and Wikidata) using only brand or domain names; no personal information is sent to them. We may disclose information if required by law, to enforce our terms, or in connection with a corporate transaction such as a merger or acquisition, in which case we will require the recipient to honour this Policy. A current list of subprocessors is available on request at hello@citehawk.com.
7. International data transfers
We and several of our subprocessors are located in, or process data in, the United States and other countries. Where we transfer personal information across borders (including from the EEA, the United Kingdom, or Australia), we rely on appropriate safeguards, such as the European Commission's Standard Contractual Clauses or equivalent mechanisms, to protect your information.
8. AI platforms
The core of the Service involves sending the prompts you configure to third-party AI providers and recording their responses. Each provider processes that data under its own terms and privacy practices, which we do not control. Do not submit personal or confidential information in prompts unless it is necessary for the monitoring you intend.
We do not use your personal information or workspace data to train AI or machine-learning models, and we do not permit our subprocessors to use it for training. Prompts are sent to AI providers through their commercial APIs, which contractually exclude the data from model training.
9. Data retention
We retain your account and monitoring data for as long as your account is active. When you delete your account, we deactivate it immediately, cancel any subscriptions you administer, and retain your data for a 90-day recovery window. After 90 days, your personal data (your login, name, email address and the sign-in, notification and billing records tied to you) is permanently and irreversibly deleted from our active systems and backups by an automated process. Monitoring data in your workspaces (prompts, AI model answers and metrics) is kept in archived form, with nothing left that links it to you. We may retain limited records for longer where required to comply with legal, tax, or accounting obligations, or to resolve disputes.
10. Your privacy rights
You can export your workspace data at any time from the Reports area in CSV or JSON. To request a copy of the personal information we hold about you, or to exercise any right below, email hello@citehawk.com. We will verify your identity and respond within 30 days (or as your local law requires). We will not discriminate against you for exercising these rights.
EEA and United Kingdom (GDPR / UK GDPR)
You have the rights to access, rectify, erase, restrict, and port your personal data; to object to processing (including direct marketing); and to withdraw consent at any time. You may also lodge a complaint with your local data protection authority.
California (CCPA / CPRA)
You have the rights to know what personal information we collect and how we use it, to access and delete it, to correct it, and to opt out of the sale or sharing of personal information. We do not sell your personal information, and we share data with analytics partners only with your consent.
Australia (Privacy Act / Australian Privacy Principles)
You have the rights to access and correct the personal information we hold about you. If you are concerned about how we have handled your information, you may contact us and, if unsatisfied, complain to the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner (OAIC).
11. Agency and client data
If you use CiteHawk to monitor brands on behalf of your own clients (for example, as a marketing agency), you act as the controller of that data and we act as your processor. You are responsible for having a lawful basis to provide that data to us and for your clients' rights. We process it only to provide the Service to you. A Data Processing Agreement is available on request.
12. Security
We use appropriate technical and organisational measures to protect personal information, including encryption in transit, access controls, and row-level data isolation between workspaces. No system is completely secure, and we cannot guarantee absolute security, but we work to protect your information and to notify you and any regulators of a breach where the law requires.
13. Children
The Service is intended for business use by adults. It is not directed to individuals under 18, and we do not knowingly collect their personal information. If we learn that we have, we will delete it promptly.
14. Changes to this Policy
We may update this Policy from time to time. We will revise the "Last updated" date above and, for material changes, take reasonable steps to notify you. Your continued use of the Service after a change takes effect constitutes acceptance of the updated Policy.
15. Contact us
For any question about this Policy or our handling of your information, contact us at hello@citehawk.com.