Privacy Policy

We collect what you type into our forms and very little else. The free check stores your practice name, industry, specialty, city, website, email and any note you add, plus the question we put to AI and the answer it gave. Our subscription products keep working after that on a schedule, including a monthly measurement that asks the AI engines about your practice by name. We never store your raw IP address, we sell nothing to anyone, and we run no advertising trackers on this site.

Last updated August 7, 2026.

Who we are

AEOptim, 675 Purdy St, Birmingham, MI 48009. We are the controller of the information described here. Write to legal@aeoptim.com or call 646-388-2960.

This policy covers aeoptim.com and every service we run under it, which is not all at one address. Orders are taken and run at app.aeoptim.com, finished reports are read at report.aeoptim.com, and the Growth Department, our subscription product, runs at growth.aeoptim.com. Our own staff console sits on a further subdomain behind Cloudflare Access. All of it is covered here. Note that our customers are practices, not patients or clients: we do not ask for, want, or knowingly accept patient records, client files, health information or anything else covered by HIPAA or by privilege. Please do not send it to us.

What the free AI Visibility Check collects

When you run the free check, we store what you entered:

  • Industry and specialty
  • Practice or firm name
  • City
  • Website address, if you give one
  • Your email address
  • Anything you type into the optional notes field

We also store what the check produced: the exact question we put to the AI engine, the answer it returned, and the verdict, meaning whether your practice was named.

Alongside that, our host passes us a small amount of context about the visit: the country, region and city your connection appears to come from, the data center that served you, your time zone, your network provider, the page that referred you, and a utm_source value if the link you followed carried one. Your IP address is never stored with your record. We hash it, keep only a fragment of that hash to enforce rate limits, and drop those rate-limit rows automatically after two days.

What an Answer Kit order collects

To run the $350 kit we take your practice name, your specialty, your city, the website address you want us to work from, your name and your email. Our crawler then reads up to twelve public pages of that website, and only what any visitor could read. We run two crawlers under two names, so blocking one does not block the other: AEOptimBot/1.0 reads a site for an Answer Kit or a Workup, and AEOptimGrowthBot/0.1 reads it for the Growth Department, including the monthly re-crawl. Both carry +https://aeoptim.com in the user-agent string. If you would rather neither of them visited a site you control, tell us and we will exclude it.

Payment goes through Stripe. Your card number is entered into Stripe's own fields and never reaches our servers. We see the confirmation that a payment succeeded and the order details attached to it.

What the Growth Department collects

The Growth Department is our subscription product, and it lives at growth.aeoptim.com rather than on the main site. Signing up takes your practice or firm name, your website, your specialty, your locations (one, or up to five), your name and your email. Our crawler then reads your homepage and up to six more public pages of that site. From those pages a model writes two things: a Practice Profile, which is a plain summary of what your site says you do, and a Growth Layer, which is the record of how visible you are and what to fix first.

After that it keeps working on a schedule, with nobody pressing a button. Three jobs run on their own, and you should know what each one reads:

  • Nightly. A model reviews your department's recent work and appends at most two short lessons to each agent's playbook. It reads the brief you wrote for each run, an excerpt of what that run produced, and your recent interactions with the department.
  • Monthly. We crawl your site again, and we put a grid of questions to the AI engines to measure whether you are being named. Two of those questions name you on purpose, which is described in the next section.
  • Monthly. We look for AEOptim reports bought under your email address or for your website's hostname, and copy their findings into your department's knowledge base so its agents can read them. If nothing matches, your changelog says so rather than pretending.

The department is built to be used from inside ChatGPT or Claude. When you use it that way, your side of the conversation happens in someone else's product first: what you type goes to OpenAI, or to Anthropic, under their terms, before any of it reaches us. We receive only the tool calls they forward. That is worth knowing before you type something sensitive into a chat window.

We keep a log of those tool calls: which tool, which agent, whether you confirmed the run, and the first 160 characters of the brief you wrote. We hold the most recent 120 entries and older ones fall off the end. That log is not only a record. The nightly job reads it, including briefs you previewed and then decided not to spend credits on, because an ask you talked yourself out of is still a real signal about what you want.

If we also host your website, the department's analytics agent reads that site's own numbers from Cloudflare: page views by real people, your busiest pages, and the countries they came from, filtered to your live site. That is aggregate data about your visitors, not a list of them. Cloudflare does not give us referrers on that plan, so the department is told plainly that it does not know where your visitors came from.

Your account

An account at growth.aeoptim.com stores your email address, a login ID if you chose one, and your password, which is kept only as a PBKDF2-SHA256 hash with a random salt. We do not store the password itself and we cannot read it. Signing in sets a cookie named kg_sess that holds a random session token and nothing else. It lasts thirty days, and signing out deletes the session on our side, not only in your browser.

When you email or call

If you write to us or call, we keep the message and your contact details so we can answer and follow up. That is it.

Why we hold any of it

  • To run the thing you asked for and send you the result.
  • To reply to you, and to follow up about the check you ran. Every email we send carries a way to stop them, and replying with "stop" is enough.
  • To keep the service standing up: rate limits, bot verification, fraud prevention, and diagnosing what broke.
  • To meet our own tax, accounting and legal obligations.

What we send to AI engines, exactly

This is the part people most want specifics on, so here they are.

The free check sends one sentence to Perplexity, which searches the live web to answer it. That sentence contains only your city, your specialty, and the kind of practice it is (a practice, a firm, or an advisory). It does not contain your practice name, your email, your website or your notes. We are asking the engine an open question about your field and your town, then reading the answer to see whether you show up in it. Sending your name would defeat the point.

The paid visibility products put nineteen questions to five engines: Google AI Overviews, ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Claude. Those questions are built from your specialty and your city and they do not name you, for the same reason the free check does not. Each engine is told an approximate location, meaning the city and state you gave us, so it answers locally instead of nationally. Google AI Overviews has no API we can call, so we capture it by running the question through our search-data provider against Google. The Search half of the Workup sends the same kind of unbranded query to that provider. Living AI Visibility runs the same nineteen questions again each month for as long as the subscription is active.

The Growth Department is the exception, and it is deliberate. Its monthly measurement is a grid of up to eight questions, and two of them name you: they ask each engine what it can tell us about your practice by name in your city, and whether it would recommend you. There is no honest way to learn what an engine says about you without saying your name to it. The rest of the grid stays unbranded. A subscription sends that grid to each of the five engines we hold keys for; a free department gets one Perplexity pull and nothing more. Every question and every answer, in the engine's own words, is written into your department's archive, so you can read exactly what was asked and exactly what came back.

The Answer Kit sends your practice name, specialty and city, plus the text of the public pages we crawled, to OpenAI, which drafts the questions and answers grounded in that text. We use a model that does not search the web, so it works only from the pages you pointed us at.

No engine is ever given your email address, and the notes field on the free check is never sent to one. Two things do travel that people do not always expect. When we crawl your site, the text we hand to OpenAI is the text on your pages, including any contact details you have published there. And when you brief an agent in the Growth Department, that brief goes to OpenAI to do the work, and it is read again by the nightly review.

The providers who process data for us

These are all of them. If a company is not on this list, it does not receive your data from us.

  • CloudflareHosting and delivery, the Workers runtime our sites and products run on, the D1 database where free-check records are stored, the KV stores that hold kit records, Growth Department records and sign-in sessions, the R2 bucket that holds the permanent archive and every department document, the queues that carry the scheduled jobs, and Turnstile, the challenge that tells a person from a bot on our forms. Turnstile receives your IP address to make that judgment. Cloudflare also measures traffic to growth.aeoptim.com, and, for a department whose website we host, supplies that site's own visitor counts.
  • PerplexityOne of the five AI engines we measure, and the only one the free check queries. Receives the questions described above.
  • OpenAITwo roles. It is ChatGPT, one of the five engines we measure. It is also the model that drafts The Answer Kit, builds a Growth Department's Practice Profile, writes that department's deliverables and runs its nightly review. In those roles it receives your practice details, the text of the public pages we crawled, and the briefs you write.
  • AnthropicClaude, one of the five engines we measure. Receives our questions the same way the other engines do, including the branded ones in a Growth Department's monthly grid.
  • Our search-data providerOur search-data provider. It runs our questions against Google so we can capture the AI Overview, and it supplies search volumes, ranking positions and overlapping-competitor domains for the Workup and for a Growth Department subscription. It receives the question text, which for the monthly branded questions includes your practice name, and it receives your website's domain. It never receives your email or your notes.
  • StripeCard processing for paid products. Receives your payment details directly, plus the order information and your email for the receipt.
  • Our email providerSends our transactional email: your check result, your kit delivery, your department's notifications. Receives your email address and the contents of the message.
  • GoogleFour things. Gemini is one of the five engines we measure, and receives our questions through the Gemini API. The city field on our forms uses Google Maps Places autocomplete, so what you type there is sent to Google to return suggestions. Our order pages, delivered reports and signed-in dashboards load their typeface from Google Fonts, which makes a request to Google that reveals your IP address and browser; the marketing pages of aeoptim.com do not, because the typeface there is served from our own server. And, only with your consent, Google Analytics 4 records aggregate usage of aeoptim.com with your IP masked, gated by the cookie banner described in our Cookie Policy.

Our analytics is two things: Google Analytics 4, gated by the cookie banner, and Cloudflare Web Analytics, which Cloudflare inserts at the edge on the pages of this domain and which the banner does not gate. Beyond those two we use no other analytics provider, no advertising network, no data broker, no customer data platform and no session recording tool.

What we never do

We do not sell your information, and we do not share it for cross-context behavioral advertising. We do not rent or trade email lists. We do not build advertising profiles. We do not track you across other websites. There is no exception to any of this that we are quietly hoping you will not ask about.

How long we keep things

  • Free check records stay in our database until you ask us to delete them.
  • Rate-limiting records are deleted automatically after two days.
  • Answer Kit, Visibility Report, Living and Workup records stay in our store until you ask us to delete them. No automatic expiry is set on them.
  • The raw archive is permanent, and that is on purpose. Every free check and every paid run also writes an untouched copy of what we asked and what the engines answered into long-term storage, with no expiry. It is what lets us show you years later exactly what an engine said on a given day. For a paid run that copy includes the order details you gave us, your email among them. For a free check it includes neither your email nor your notes.
  • Growth Department records have no expiry either. Your client record, your department and its agents' playbooks, every version of your Growth Layer, every run and the document it produced, your Practice Profile, your Brand Kit and the artifacts pulled from your reports all stay until you ask us to delete them. We keep every Growth Layer version rather than only the newest, because comparing this month to last month is the product.
  • The interaction log holds your 120 most recent tool calls. Older entries drop off the end as new ones arrive.
  • Sign-in sessions expire thirty days after you sign in, or immediately when you sign out.
  • Email and billing records are kept as long as our tax and accounting obligations require.

Deleting a Growth Department is a job a person does here, not a button, so give us a few business days. When we do it we remove the client record, the department, every Growth Layer version, the runs, the interaction log and the archive together.

Your choices

Ask us to show you what we hold, correct it, or delete it, and we will do it. Email legal@aeoptim.com from the address you used, or tell us which address you used, and we will confirm when it is done. There is no charge and no form to fill out. If you live somewhere that gives you formal rights over your data, such as California, Colorado, Connecticut, Virginia or the European Economic Area, exercising them here is the same email. We will not treat you differently for asking.

To stop hearing from us, reply "stop" to any email we send. That is enough.

Security

The site runs over HTTPS. Secrets and API keys live in the platform's encrypted storage, not in our code. Forms are rate limited and bot verified. Access to customer records is limited to the people who need it to do the work. No system is perfect, and anyone who tells you theirs is should worry you.

Where the data sits

We are a US company and our providers are largely US based, so assume your information is processed in the United States. If you are writing to us from outside the US, that is the transfer you are consenting to.

Children

This service is sold to professional practices. It is not directed at children, and we do not knowingly collect information from anyone under 16. If you think we have, tell us and we will remove it.

Changes to this policy

If we add a provider, change what we collect, or change what we do with it, this page changes and the date at the top changes with it. Anything meaningful gets said in plain words rather than buried in a clause.

Questions

Write to legal@aeoptim.com or call 646-388-2960. A person reads it.

AEOptim, 675 Purdy St, Birmingham, MI 48009. Related pages: Terms & Conditions, Cookie Policy, Accessibility.