Privacy

Privacy policy

This page explains, in plain language, what Indie Stack Lab ("we") collects, who receives it, how long it is kept and how you can opt out. It covers this website only, not the sites you visit from our links.

The free checker

When you use "Is ChatGPT citing your site?" on the home page:

• Your questions are sent to two AI services so they can answer them with web search:
  • MixRoute (ELITE CLOUD PTE. LTD., Singapore), an API gateway that forwards each question to OpenAI web search, the search used by ChatGPT. See MixRoute's privacy policy and OpenAI's privacy policy on openai.com.
  • Perplexity (Perplexity AI, Inc.), using its Sonar model through the Perplexity API. See Perplexity's privacy policy on perplexity.ai.
• Your website address is not sent to those services. We compare it with the sources their answers cite.
• Cloudflare Turnstile (Cloudflare, Inc.) checks that you are a person. It receives your IP address and browser signals. See the Turnstile privacy addendum.

What we keep: the result of each check (your questions and the sources each engine cited) is cached for 7 days so the same check is not paid for twice, then deleted. The website address is kept only inside a one-way fingerprint used to find that cached result. To enforce the limit of 5 checks per day, we store a one-way hash of your IP address with a counter for the current day (UTC); it is deleted the next day. We also keep a monthly total of what the checker cost us, which contains no personal data. We do not log the website addresses or questions you enter.

Please do not type personal information into the questions.

Analytics

We use Google Analytics 4 (Google LLC) to see which pages are read, how far, and which links are clicked. It also notes when the free checker form is started or submitted, but never what you type into it. It sets the _ga cookies and estimates your country and city from your IP address; we never see your full IP address. Event data tied to a browser is kept for 14 months. You can opt out with the Google Analytics opt-out add-on or by blocking cookies.

If the site is served through Cloudflare, Cloudflare may add Cloudflare Web Analytics (Cloudflare, Inc.), which counts page views, referrers and page speed in aggregate. It does not use cookies and does not build profiles across sites. See Cloudflare's privacy policy.

We do not run advertising pixels and do not show personalised ads.

Links to tools

We have affiliate relationships with Mangools, SE Ranking, beehiiv, Movavi (see our disclosure). Those links carry a referral code that identifies this site, not you. The tools may set their own cookies after you click; we only receive aggregate numbers such as how many sign-ups were referred.

What we do not do

• No accounts, no newsletter sign-up and no payments on this site.
• We do not sell, rent or trade personal data.
• We share data only as described above, or when the law requires it.

Your choices and rights

You can use every article without the checker. To ask what we hold about you or to have it deleted, email us. Because checker data is short-lived and not linked to a name, in most cases there is nothing left to delete after 7 days.

Children

This site is not aimed at children under 13 and we do not knowingly collect their data.

Changes

If we change what we collect, we update this page and the date at the top.

Contact

Email hello@indiestacklab.com.