Privacy notice

01Who we are

Outpost (outposttraffic.com) is operated by Tesseract Systems Corporation (“Outpost”, “we”, “us”). We decide what information the service collects and how it is used, and this notice covers all of it: the public website, the waitlist, the free audit, your account and workspaces, and the blogs and links Outpost runs for you. The one exception is the waitlist on a coming-soon page Outpost hosts for a customer: there the customer decides, and we act for them (see Waitlists on our customers’ pages).

Questions and requests go to support@outposttraffic.com. A real person reads every message.

02The short version

• We collect what the service needs to run your growth work, and nothing for advertising. We don’t sell your information, and we don’t use it to train AI models.
• Our own pages load no third-party scripts, fonts or analytics. The only cookies are for signing in, for your free audit, and for your time zone.
• Connected accounts (Google, Cloudflare, WordPress, Ghost, Webflow, LinkedIn, X, Bluesky) are kept as encrypted keys, and you can remove each one in Settings › Connections.
• Google Search Console data is read-only, shown only in your workspace, and deleted when you disconnect. None of it is sent to an AI model. See Google user data.
• You can download a copy of your information or delete it yourself in Settings, any time, or ask us by email.

03What we collect

The website and the waitlist

When you join the waitlist we store your email address, when you signed up and when you agreed to receive launch and development updates, and, if you give them, your website’s address and the plan and article volume you picked in the pricing explorer. An Agency & Concierge enquiry stores your name, email address, the details you give (agency, website, number of sites, message) and when you sent it; our team is notified by email.

The free audit

When you audit a site we store its address, what our crawler (OutpostBot) read from that site’s public pages, the business profile and findings built from it, and the score. To limit abuse we store a hash of your network address that changes every day, never the address itself. Your browser gets a cookie that lets it reopen your audit (see Cookies). If you ask us to email you the report, we store that email address, when you agreed, and the link we sent.

Your account and workspaces

• Account: your email address, a one-way hash of your password (Argon2id; we never store the password itself), when you verified your email and accepted the terms.
• Workspaces: names, members and their roles, settings such as your time zone, and your site’s name and address, goals and budget.
• Your product: the business facts and answers you give or confirm, the competitors you add, the plan, briefs, articles and their revisions, social posts, test ideas and experiments, decisions, and the Activity receipts of everything Outpost does.
• Files you upload: images (we re-encode PNG, JPEG and WebP files, which removes their embedded metadata such as location), SVG, MP4 and PDF files (kept as uploaded), with their file names and alt text. Numbers you upload as CSV files, payment exports included, are kept as the file you sent (up to 1 MB) and the rows read from it; upload only data you are allowed to share.
• Billing: your plan, its status and dates, and Stripe’s customer and subscription references. Card details are entered on Stripe’s own pages and never reach our servers; the payment events Stripe sends us are stored with their personal fields removed.

Connected accounts

When you connect Cloudflare, Google Search Console, WordPress, Ghost, Webflow, LinkedIn, X or Bluesky, we keep the key that service gives us (an API token, OAuth tokens, a WordPress application password or a Ghost Admin API key) encrypted, plus what we need to show and use the connection: the account’s email address or handle, display name and picture, the Cloudflare zone, the Search Console property, your site’s address and the WordPress user, Ghost site or Webflow site and collection Outpost publishes to, the permissions you granted, and the last four characters of a token so you can recognise it. Bluesky app passwords are used once to sign in and never stored.

Visitors to your blog and tracked links

The blog Outpost hosts for you and Outpost’s short links set no cookies and run no scripts. For each visit we store the page or link, the time, the referring website (its host name only) and whether it looked like a bot, plus a visitor hash made from a random value that changes every day, the visitor’s network address and browser type. The daily value is kept only in memory, so the same person can’t be recognised from one day to the next, and the network address and browser type themselves are never stored. We record no location. Images in an article load from wherever they are hosted.

If you add Outpost’s attribution snippet to your own site, it keeps the click reference and campaign tags in the visitor’s browser on your site (localStorage, 30 days) so your checkout can pass them on; it sends nothing to Outpost.

Conversations (Reddit)

When the Conversations inbox is on, Outpost searches Reddit for public threads that match your product, using Reddit’s official API. It keeps a matching thread’s link, community, title, a short excerpt and why it matched, but not the author’s name. Replies are always written and posted by you.

Service records

To run, bill and fix the service we keep records of the background work done for you (job logs and step results), of every call to an AI model (which model, size, cost, outcome and short excerpts of the request and answer with keys, email addresses and long numbers masked), and of what each task cost. We keep the address and reason when an email bounces or someone unsubscribes, so we stop sending to it. We don’t keep copies of the emails we send.

04How we use it

• To provide the service: audit your site, plan and write content, publish to your blog, post where you approve it, measure results, run experiments and track the 90-day guarantee.
• To email you: account emails (verification, password reset, invitations), the audit report you asked for, billing notices, publishing heads-ups and the Monday briefing. The briefing has an unsubscribe link; we never send purchased-list marketing.
• To keep it safe: rate limits, sign-in lockouts, abuse checks and investigating problems.
• To bill you, through Stripe.
• To learn which tests work: when a test decides, Outpost adds two numbers to a count kept across all customers for that kind of test: whether the new version won, and by how much (its lift). Test ideas then show what to expect (“2 of 5 tests of this kind won across Outpost”). Only those two numbers are pooled, never which site, page, text or search the test was about.

We don’t sell or rent your information, we don’t use it for advertising, and we don’t use it, or anything Google shares with us, to train AI models.

05Waitlists on our customers’ pages

A coming-soon page Outpost hosts for a customer, on their blog address and in their name, can collect email addresses for their launch waitlist. For those addresses the customer decides how they are used, and Outpost processes them only on the customer’s behalf, as their processor:

• What we store: the address, when it signed up, the words the person agreed to, and whether and when they confirmed it.
• What we do with it: send an email to confirm the address (with a link that removes it again; it is sent again only if the person signs up again, at most three times), and keep the list for the customer, who can see it, export it and remove people. The page never shows the list to anyone.
• What we never do: email these addresses for Outpost, add them to Outpost’s own lists, use them for advertising, or give them to anyone other than the customer and the email provider that delivers the confirmation.
• How long: an address nobody confirmed is deleted 30 days after its last confirmation email. A confirmed one stays until the person removes it from the email’s link, the customer removes it, or the customer deletes their workspace.

To leave a waitlist, use the link in its confirmation email. For anything else about one, contact the business that runs the page; you can also write to support@outposttraffic.com and we will help them answer.

06AI models

Outpost uses Anthropic’s Claude models through Anthropic’s API to do parts of the work. What a request contains depends on the job:

• Understanding a business: the text of the public pages our crawler read from the site being audited.
• Writing articles: the brief, which is built from your business facts, voice, audience, target search phrase, outline and any note you add.
• Drafting social posts and Reddit replies: your product facts, the article or link, and for replies the public thread and the community’s rules.
• Researching a competitor you add: the text of that competitor’s public pages.

Nothing from Search Console, and never your Google account’s email address, is sent to an AI model: test ideas built from your searches are written by Outpost’s own rules. To check whether AI assistants mention you, we send questions about your category through DataForSEO, which asks the assistants on our behalf (see Who receives it).

07Google user data

Outpost uses Google’s APIs only when you choose “Connect Search Console” in Settings › Connections, for the site you connect it on. A workspace on Autopilot can run up to three sites, and each site connects its own Search Console; removing a site from the workspace revokes Outpost’s access for that site. There is no “Sign in with Google”.

What we ask for

How we use it

Once a day Outpost imports the Search Analytics numbers for your site (the first import reads the last 120 days, later ones the newest few days). They are used only for features you see in your workspace: Content’s search clicks per article, the Visibility score’s indexed pages, Territory’s indexed listings, test ideas and before-and-after experiments, which of a competitor’s searches you appear for too, the 90-day guarantee’s impressions metric, the Command Center’s traffic, and the impressions line in your Monday briefing. Only members of your workspace can see them.

Google user data is never sold, never used for advertising (including retargeting or personalised ads), never used to train AI or machine-learning models, and never shown to other customers. It is transferred only to the services that store and process it for you: our hosting and our encrypted backups; our email provider, when the Monday briefing emails your workspace’s members their weekly impressions. It is never sent to an AI model: Outpost’s own rules turn your searches into test ideas and their wording. Our staff don’t read it except when you ask us to help with your account, to investigate abuse or a security problem, or when the law requires it.

When a before-and-after test decides, its result counts towards the pooled track record described under How we use it: for those tests the lift is the change in Search Console clicks per impression. Only whether the new version won and that one percentage leave your workspace, aggregated with every other customer’s, never the page, the search or any of the numbers behind it.

Outpost’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.

How it is protected

The refresh token Google gives us is encrypted (AES-256-GCM) with a key kept outside the database, and short-lived access tokens are only held in memory while an import runs.

Disconnecting

Remove Search Console in Settings › Connections. Outpost revokes its access at Google, deletes its token, and in the same step deletes every Search Console number it imported for your site (daily totals, page rows, search-query rows, and the keyword positions read from it), the test ideas built from its searches, and the Google account’s email address. An Activity receipt says what was deleted. Your Search Console account itself is not affected.

You can also remove Outpost’s access in your Google Account’s permissions. Imports stop (the next daily import finds the access gone) and the connection shows as needing attention; the numbers already imported are deleted when you remove the connection in Outpost, or when you ask us.

What already became part of another record stays with it until your workspace is deleted: weekly totals in a past Monday briefing, the guarantee’s starting 28-day average and its past health checks, the results of tests you started, and which of a competitor’s searches were marked as yours. Keyword positions from Outpost’s own rank check stay too, because they never came from Search Console.

08Cookies and similar storage

The public website sets no cookies, except the sign-in cookie once you open the audit, signup or sign-in pages (the audit form uses it to block automated submissions). There is no advertising and no third-party analytics: every script, style sheet, font and image comes from our own server. Stripe’s pages load only when you go to checkout or the billing portal.

To start the homepage globe facing your part of the world, your browser reads its time zone (or language) and looks it up in a table that ships with the page. That happens only in your browser; the public website never sends it to us.

09Who receives it

These services receive information from Outpost to provide the service. The ones marked “when you connect” or “when on” receive nothing until you connect them or the feature is switched on for your workspace.

Our crawler (OutpostBot) and page renderer visit public web pages to do the work: your own site, the competitors you add, the directories and listings Outpost submits to, and posts you ask it to check. They respect robots.txt and never get around a sign-in or a bot check.

We may disclose information if the law requires it, and it would pass to a successor if Outpost were sold or merged; we would tell you first.

10How long we keep it

Records of what each task cost (model work and paid data) belong to their workspace and are deleted with it.

11How we protect it

• Every page is served over HTTPS, under a strict content security policy that allows no third-party scripts.
• Passwords are stored only as Argon2id hashes. Resetting your password signs out every session.
• Connection keys (Google, Cloudflare, Webflow, LinkedIn, X and Bluesky tokens, WordPress application passwords, WordPress.com tokens and Ghost Admin API keys) are encrypted at rest with AES-256-GCM, each bound to its own connection, with a key kept outside the database.
• Every query is scoped to your workspace; members of one workspace can never read another’s data.
• Backups are encrypted before they leave our server. Our record of each email sent names only the kind of message, never its content or recipient.

Our security page has more detail and explains how to report a vulnerability.

12Your rights and choices

You can download a copy of your information and delete your workspaces and your account yourself, in Settings (below). You can also ask us to show you what we hold about you, to correct it, to send you a copy, to delete it, or to stop using it for something. Email support@outposttraffic.com from the address on your account (or tell us which audit, signup or enquiry it is about). We may ask you to confirm the request comes from you, and we answer within 30 days.

• A copy: a workspace’s owners download everything in it as a zip from Settings › Export & delete (JSON for each part, articles as Markdown, the files you uploaded), and anyone can download their own account’s data from Settings › Your account. The download link works for 7 days, only for the person who asked. Neither includes passwords or connection keys. Email still works too.
• Deleting a workspace: an owner deletes it from Settings › Export & delete, confirming with their password (or, without one, a link we email them). It disappears for everyone at once and Outpost stops working on it; 24 hours later we cancel its subscription, revoke Outpost’s access at the services you connected where they allow it, and delete everything in it: sites, audits, profile and answers, plan, articles and their revisions, social posts, measurement, experiments, Activity, connections and their keys, the Search Console numbers, billing records, and the files stored for it. Until then you can cancel and everything comes back as it was.
• Deleting your account: from Settings › Your account. It removes your login and your memberships, and deletes the workspaces only you were in; things you did in a workspace you share stay in it without your name. If you are the only owner of a workspace other people use, you make one of them an owner first. You are signed out everywhere at once, and the rest happens 24 hours later; the link we email you cancels it until then.
• What stays: a short receipt of each deletion (its reference, when it ran and what each step did; no names, addresses, domains or content); the payment reference of a subscription we couldn’t cancel automatically, only until our team has cancelled it by hand; records of what Outpost staff did on the platform (who, and which job or workspace by its id); if you asked us to stop emailing you, the address stays on our do-not-send list; Stripe keeps its own payment records under its terms; backups age out within about 6 months. Outpost doesn’t change your other accounts: access you gave a service that offers no way to remove it, and DNS records Outpost added in your own DNS account, stay there until you remove them (we list them before you confirm, and again in the email).
• Choices any time: remove a connection in Settings › Connections, unsubscribe from the Monday briefing from its link, remove an uploaded file, or leave the waitlist by emailing us.

If you are unhappy with how we handled your information, please tell us first. You can also complain to the data protection authority where you live.

13Where it is processed

Outpost runs on a server at Oracle Cloud Infrastructure in the United States (Chicago), where its email is sent and its backups are kept too. Several of the other services listed above (among them Stripe, Anthropic, Cloudflare and Google) are based in, or process data in, the United States and other countries, so your information may be processed outside the country where you live. Where the law requires it, we rely on safeguards such as the European Commission’s standard contractual clauses in those providers’ data processing terms.

14Children

Outpost is a business service and isn’t meant for anyone under 16. We don’t knowingly collect information from children; if you think a child has given us information, write to us and we will delete it.

15Changes to this notice

When what Outpost collects or how it uses information changes, we update this notice and its date first. For significant changes we email account owners before they take effect, and we ask again before using Google user data in any new way.