Privacy Policy
SearchGrade ("we," "us," or "our") is committed to protecting your privacy. This policy explains what personal data we collect, how we use it, and your choices. In short: our cookies only keep the site working and remember settings you choose, none of them tracks you or serves ads, we store your audit history, payments are handled by Stripe, and we never sell your personal information.
Definitions
- Personal data
- Information that identifies you, such as your name and email address.
- Processing
- Any operation we perform on your data, such as storing, using, or deleting it.
- Cookie
- A small file stored in your browser. We use no tracking or advertising cookies; section 3 lists every cookie we set.
- Audit data
- The URLs you submit and the results we save to your report history.
1. Information We Collect
Account information
When you sign in with Google, we receive your name, email address, and profile picture from Google. We store this to identify your account and personalize your experience.
Audit data
We store URLs you audit, your audit results (score, grade, PDF filename), and the date of each audit. This powers your report history in the Dashboard.
Usage data
We may collect standard server logs including IP addresses, browser type, and page requests. This information is used for security, abuse prevention, and service improvement.
Payment information
If you subscribe to a paid plan, your payment is processed by Stripe. We do not store your credit card number or billing details; Stripe handles this securely on our behalf. We receive and store your Stripe customer ID and subscription status.
2. How We Use Your Information
- To provide, operate, and improve the Service
- To save your audit history and generate PDF reports
- To process payments and manage your subscription
- To send transactional emails (e.g., scheduled audit reports, billing receipts), only when you have opted in to a feature that requires email delivery
- To detect and prevent abuse, fraud, and security incidents
- To comply with legal obligations
We do not sell your personal information to third parties.
3. Cookies and Sessions
We use cookies only to keep the site working and to remember settings you choose. None is used to track or profile you, none is used for advertising, and none is shared with a third party, so no cookie-consent banner is required. These are all the cookies we set:
- Session (
nuxt-session): set on every visit. It holds a random, sealed (encrypted) identifier. Once you sign in, it also holds your name, email address, profile picture link, plan and active team, sealed so that only our server can read them, and that is what keeps you signed in. It has no fixed expiry and normally ends when you close your browser. Signing out removes your account details from it. - Sign-in security (
nuxt-auth-state): set only when you click Sign in, and deleted when you come back from Google, whether you finished or cancelled, or after 10 minutes at most. It protects the Google sign-in step against forged requests. - Display settings (
sg_theme,sg_text_size,sg_motion): set only if you change the theme, text size or motion setting, and kept for one year so the site remembers your choice. - Demo (
sg_demo): set only if you open the product demo, and kept for seven days.
Some features also remember settings in your browser's local storage, such as custom score weights and your recent comparisons. You can clear these, and any cookie above, at any time in your browser settings. We do not use tracking cookies, advertising cookies, or third-party analytics cookies.
We do collect basic page-view analytics, such as which pages are visited and which site a visitor arrived from, using self-hosted software that runs on our own servers. It sets no cookies, and no third party receives this data.
4. Third-Party Services
We use the following third-party services that may receive limited data:
- Google OAuth: for sign-in authentication. Governed by Google's Privacy Policy.
- Stripe: for payment processing. Governed by Stripe's Privacy Policy.
- Google PageSpeed Insights API: when auditing a URL, we send that URL to the PSI API to retrieve performance metrics. No personal information is transmitted.
- Google Fonts: fonts are loaded from Google's CDN. Google may log the request.
5. Data Retention
We retain your account information and audit history for as long as your account is active. You may delete individual audit reports from your Dashboard at any time. To delete your account entirely, contact us at support@searchgrade.app and we will permanently delete your account and associated data within 30 days.
6. Data Security
We use industry-standard measures to protect your data, including encrypted database connections (TLS), session tokens stored securely, and server-side input validation. No method of transmission or storage is 100% secure, and we cannot guarantee absolute security.
7. Children's Privacy
The Service is not directed to children under 13. We do not knowingly collect personal information from children. If you believe we have inadvertently collected information from a child, contact us immediately.
8. Your Rights
Depending on your location, you may have the right to:
- Access the personal information we hold about you
- Request correction of inaccurate information
- Request deletion of your personal information
- Object to or restrict our processing of your data
- Data portability (receive your data in a machine-readable format)
To exercise any of these rights, email us at support@searchgrade.app.
9. Changes to This Policy
We may update this Privacy Policy from time to time. We will notify you of material changes by updating the "Last updated" date above. Continued use of the Service after changes constitutes acceptance of the revised policy.
10. Contact
For privacy-related questions or requests, contact us at support@searchgrade.app.