strawbi

Privacy Policy

Effective 17 October 2026

This explains what information strawbi collects, why, who we share it with, and the choices you have. strawbi is run by Carte Ltd (company number 15322902), 71–75 Shelton Street, Covent Garden, London WC2H 9JQ, United Kingdom, which is responsible for your information under UK data protection law (UK GDPR) and, where it applies, the EU GDPR. Short version: we collect what we need to sign you in and crawl the websites you add, we don't sell personal information, and we don't use ad-tracking cookies.

What we collect

Your account

  • Your name, email address and profile picture from Google when you sign in.
  • The websites you add, the name you give them, and the settings you choose.
  • Your IP address is used briefly to stop abuse of our forms. We keep only a one-way scrambled version of it, for a day at most, and never with your account, though our hosting provider may keep standard request logs for a short time.

The websites you add

  • We crawl the public pages of each website you add: its robots.txt, sitemaps, llms.txt files and HTML pages. We keep the page text, the raw HTML, titles, headings, dates, authors named on the page, and markdown versions where the site offers them, as a series of versions over time.
  • A website can contain personal information (an author's name on a blog post, a team page). We store it only as part of the page it appears on, show it only to the people in the account that added the site, and never use it for anything else. If you want a page we hold removed, email us.
  • You can add a site before proving it's yours. Unverified sites are crawled with a smaller page limit. We only crawl what is publicly reachable and what the site's robots.txt allows.

The questions you track and their answers

  • The questions you choose to track, the brands you name (yours and your competitors'), and who in your account added or changed them.
  • Each question is sent, without your name or account, to the AI search services we use, once a day each. We keep every answer, the pages it cited, and which brands it named or cited. To suggest questions, we send the text of some of your crawled pages to an AI model.
  • When an answer cites a page on any website, we fetch that public page (following its robots.txt) and keep its versions over time, so you can see when a page cited instead of yours changed. These copies aren't part of your account: they stay when you delete it, and other customers whose answers cite the same page see the same copy. We never show anyone which questions you track or which competitors you follow.

Why we use it

We use information only where the law allows: to provide the service you signed up for (contract), to meet legal obligations, and for our legitimate interests in running a safe service and in reading public web pages on your behalf.

  • To run strawbi: sign you in, crawl the sites you added on a schedule, ask your questions every day, and show you what we found.
  • To keep the service working and safe: rate limits, error logs, and stopping abuse.
  • To answer your questions when you write to us.

Who we share it with

We don't sell personal information. We share it only with the companies that help us run strawbi:

  • Railway (hosting, in the United States) for our servers, database and file storage.
  • Google for sign-in.
  • The AI search services we ask your questions (among Perplexity, OpenAI, Google and Anthropic), which receive the question text only.
  • Anthropic, which receives page text to suggest questions, and TypeSafe, which receives short passages of answers to check whether they mention your brand.
  • An error-reporting service, which receives error messages and request details when something breaks.

Some of these are outside the UK. Where that's the case we rely on the UK's adequacy decisions or standard contractual clauses. We'll also share information when the law requires it.

How long we keep it

  • Your account, for as long as you have one. Remove a site and everything we recorded for it is deleted.
  • Crawl records (page versions and files), for as long as the site is in an account.
  • Your questions, their answers and your brands, for as long as the site is in an account.
  • Copies of pages that answers cited, while answers keep citing them; we haven't set an end date yet.
  • Error logs, up to 90 days.

Your rights

You can ask for a copy of your information, ask us to correct or delete it, object to how we use it, or complain to the Information Commissioner's Office (ico.org.uk). Email [email protected] and we'll answer within a month.

Cookies

One cookie keeps you signed in, and a short-lived one carries you through Google sign-in. Your theme preference is stored in your browser. No advertising or analytics cookies.

Website owners

If our crawler visited your site, this page explains what it fetched, how fast, and how to keep it out. We follow robots.txt.

Changes

If we change this policy in a way that matters, we'll email account holders before it takes effect.

Questions? Email [email protected].