Belcher

Privacy Policy

Effective August 4, 2026

This describes how Belcher currently handles data, in plain language. It's a starting point, not legal advice. Have it reviewed by a qualified attorney, and keep it accurate if your data practices change.

The short version

Belcher is two things: an AI Visibility Audit that checks whether ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, and Perplexity recommend your business, and Reputation Monitoring, which audits your reviews. We store what's needed to run your account and subscription, your AI Visibility Audit history (score, per-engine results, and, if you provide one, a website health check), and your review-audit results (flagged reviews and the dispute/response drafts we generate), so you can revisit any of it from your account. You can delete saved audits anytime. We do not store your full pasted review text beyond the short excerpts that appear in your results. When we check whether an AI engine recommends you, we ask a generic question built only from your category and city, never your business name. Two optional features do send more: reading your website to fill in your details, and generating a fix for you. Both are described below.

What we collect

  • Account: your email address and a hashed (never plaintext) password.
  • Billing: your subscription status and Stripe customer/subscription identifiers. Card details are handled by Stripe. We never see or store them.
  • AI Visibility Audits: your website URL, and the business name, category, and city (we read these from your site and you confirm or correct them). Running a report requires an account, and your results (score, which engines mentioned you, and any website health findings) are saved to it. Before you sign up, we briefly use your IP address, held only in server memory, to limit how often the website-reading step can run, and never write it to our database.
  • Website health checks: if you add a website URL, our servers fetch that page's public homepage directly to check for things like structured data, a meta description, and page speed. Alongside the resulting checklist and scores, we store a short extract of the page's visible text (roughly the first 2,000 characters) and its title, meta description, and main heading, so we can fill in your business details and generate fixes without re-fetching your site.
  • Continuous monitoring (paid plans): while you're subscribed, Belcher re-runs the checks above for each business you've tracked about once a week on its own, without you starting it, and emails you when your score moves meaningfully. Each automatic run is saved to your history like any other. It stops when your subscription does.
  • Usage: per-request token/cost metadata (no review text or audit content), used to apply fair-use rate limits and prevent abuse of the unlimited plan.
  • Reputation Monitoring results: the flagged reviews (with short excerpts), dispute drafts, and suggested responses we generate, plus theme/sentiment metadata for your trends, saved to your account so you can revisit them.
  • Connected sources: if you connect a Google Business Profile, we store the OAuth tokens (encrypted) needed to read and reply to its reviews. If you set up Yelp email forwarding, we store the dedicated forwarding address and process the review-notification emails sent to it, extracting only the review content described above; the rest of the forwarded email isn't stored.
  • Contact messages: if you use the contact form, the name, email, and message you send us.

About your review text

The full review text you paste for Reputation Monitoring is sent to our AI provider to generate your results and is not stored in full on our servers. What we keep is the result of the audit: the short excerpts, drafts, and metadata described above, so your disputes and trends are there when you come back. Delete any saved audit from your account and its stored content is removed.

About your AI Visibility Audit data

To check whether an AI engine recommends your business, we ask it a generic recommendation-style question built only from the category and city you provide, for example “What are the best {category} options in {city}?”. We do not send your business name to OpenAI, Google, Anthropic, or Perplexity as part of that question. We then check the engine's response ourselves, on our own servers, for whether it mentions your business name (simple text matching, not a separate AI call). Your website URL is fetched directly by Belcher's servers and checked with Google's PageSpeed API.

A few optional features do send more, and only when you use them:

  • Reading your website (Claude): when you enter your URL, we send that page's public text (title, meta description, main heading, and a short extract of the visible body text) to Claude to work out your business name, category, and city, so you don't have to type them. You confirm or correct the result before anything runs.
  • One-click fixes (Claude): when you ask us to generate a fix, we send your business name, category, city, website URL, and that same page text to Claude to write the snippet you'll paste into your site.
  • Landing page review (Claude, paid): when you generate this from a report, we send your business name, category, city, and the signals we found on your homepage (whether it has a form, phone number, calls to action, a testimonials section, and a short text extract) to Claude to write the scored review.
  • Competitor snapshot (Perplexity, paid): when you generate this from a report, we send your business name, category, and city to Perplexity, which searches the live web for real competing businesses. This is the only feature that sends your business name to Perplexity.
  • The AI Growth Agent (Claude): while the agent is switched on for a business, we send that business's name, category, city, and the stored extract of your website text to Claude each week to draft your Google Business Profile content. The drafts are stored in your account until you publish or skip them. If your notes are empty, the agent may also add a one-time prompt asking you to fill them in, this is a fixed message, not something sent to any AI provider. If you save your Google Business Profile link, we store it to identify the listing; we do not connect to, read, or write to your Google Business Profile.

All of these use only your website's own publicly visible content (plus, for the competitor snapshot, your business name/category/city), and none of them run unless you start them.

Third parties we share with

We use a small set of service providers to operate Belcher, each receiving only what they need:

  • Anthropic (Claude): analyzes review-audit requests, is one of the AI engines checked in your Visibility Audit, and powers the optional features described above (reading your website to fill in your details, generating one-click fixes, the landing page review, and writing your AI Growth Agent's weekly content).
  • OpenAI (ChatGPT): one of the AI engines checked in your Visibility Audit.
  • Google (Gemini and PageSpeed Insights): Gemini is one of the AI engines checked; PageSpeed checks your website's performance if you provide a URL.
  • Perplexity: one of the AI engines checked in your Visibility Audit, and powers the optional competitor snapshot feature described above.
  • Stripe: processes payments and manages your subscription.
  • Resend: sends transactional email (password resets, contact form).
  • Neon: hosts our database (account and subscription data).
  • Vercel: hosts and serves the application.

We do not sell your personal information.

Cookies

We use a single essential cookie to keep you logged in (your session). We don't use advertising or third-party tracking cookies.

Data retention

We keep account and billing data for as long as your account is active and as needed for legal and accounting purposes. Password-reset links expire after one hour.

Your choices

You can delete any saved review audit from Reputation Monitoring's Audits tab, and cancel your subscription anytime through the billing portal. To access or delete the rest of your account data, including your AI Visibility Audit history, contact us and we'll help.

Security

Passwords are hashed, traffic is served over HTTPS, and secrets are stored server-side. No system is perfectly secure, but we take reasonable measures to protect your data.

Changes & contact

We'll update the effective date above when this policy changes. Questions? Reach us through the contact page.