Privacy Policy

This Privacy Policy describes how BenchTruth ("we", "us") handles information when you use benchtruth.com (the "Service").

BenchTruth is a free, public benchmark-data site. We collect very little: no user accounts, no payments, no user-submitted content. The datasets we publish contain measurements of automation platforms - never personal data. The one piece of personal information we handle is an email address, and only if you type it into the subscribe box yourself. What happens to it is in section 1. If you have questions, contact us at @benchtruth on X.

1. Information We Collect

Collected automatically

• Analytics data. We use PostHog to collect anonymized usage data: page views, referrer URLs, country-level location, device and browser type, and clicks on outbound links (we specifically measure which pages send readers to which automation platforms - that is part of our published research on AI-referred traffic). Session recordings are disabled. PostHog may store a random anonymous identifier in your browser's local storage or a first-party cookie so repeat visits are not double-counted; it identifies a browser, not a person.
• Server access logs. Our hosting provider (Vercel) automatically records request metadata (timestamp, path, response status, approximate IP) for operational and security purposes. We do not profile, aggregate or sell this data.

If you subscribe

There is a subscribe box on some pages. If you use it, here is the whole of it.

• What we take: your email address. Nothing else. No name, no company, no job title, and no field asking for them.
• Where it goes: to Buttondown, the service that stores the list and sends the emails. It is not copied into our benchmark database, and it is never attached to analytics.
• What we send: a monthly note about what the numbers did, what broke, and what we got wrong. That is the entire mailing list. There is no second list, no drip sequence, and no vendor content.
• Unsubscribing: every email carries a one-click unsubscribe link. It takes effect immediately and we do not ask why.
• What we will never do: sell the list, rent it, share it with a vendor whose platform we measure, or use it to target advertising. If that ever changes, it changes here first and we will say so in the newsletter before it takes effect.
• Deleting: unsubscribing removes you from the list. If you also want the record deleted, ask at @benchtruth and we will do it.

Information we do NOT collect

• No names or passwords (there are no accounts)
• No email address unless you enter one in the subscribe box yourself
• No payment data (the Service is free)
• No user-uploaded content
• No advertising IDs or cross-site tracking pixels

2. How We Use Information

• Site improvement: aggregated analytics tell us which datasets are read and where readers come from (including AI assistants such as ChatGPT and Perplexity - measuring that referral channel is a stated goal of this project).
• Attribution research: outbound-click counts feed our published funnel analysis (AI citation → visit → outbound click). Only aggregate counts are ever published.
• Operational integrity: hosting logs help detect abuse and diagnose outages.

3. Third-Party Services

• Buttondown (mailing list, only if you subscribe): privacy policy
• Vercel (hosting): privacy policy
• PostHog (analytics, US cloud): privacy policy
• Cloudflare (DNS): privacy policy

Our measurement backend (Supabase Postgres) stores benchmark run data only - webhook timestamps and run IDs we generate ourselves. It holds no visitor data.

4. AI Crawler Disclosure

BenchTruth is a public data site and we explicitly welcome AI crawlers (GPTBot, OAI-SearchBot, PerplexityBot, ClaudeBot, Google-Extended and others). Content and data you read here may be used by AI search engines to answer questions elsewhere, with or without citation - that is the intended outcome. Your individual reading activity is not exposed to crawlers; they fetch the same public pages anyone can fetch.

5. Cookies

No advertising or cross-site tracking cookies. The only browser storage in use is PostHog's first-party anonymous identifier described in section 1.

6. Data Retention and Your Rights

Analytics data is retained under PostHog's standard retention and never enriched into personal profiles. Depending on your jurisdiction (e.g. GDPR, Australian Privacy Act), you may have rights to access or erase personal data; since we hold essentially none beyond anonymized analytics, the practical remedy is blocking analytics in your browser, which the site fully supports - every page works with analytics blocked.

7. Changes

We may update this policy as the Service evolves. Material changes will be reflected in the "Last updated" date above.