Data Policy

This page explains where the data in your report comes from, how long we keep it, and the principles behind both. It complements our Privacy Policy, which covers personal information.

Where report data comes from

• Your live website. Our crawler (GoodMarketerBot) reads the public pages of the site you submit, the same way search engines do.
• Common Crawl. Domain authority, backlink and AI-discoverability signals come from Common Crawl's open, public web archive.
• Google autocomplete. Keyword ideas are derived from real, public autocomplete suggestions. Demand figures are our own relative estimates, not paid search-volume data.
• Self-hosted Lighthouse. Core Web Vitals in deep scans are measured by Lighthouse running on our own machines.

What we deliberately don't use

• No paid third-party SEO APIs or data resellers.
• No scraping of private, logged-in or paywalled content.
• No purchased email lists or enriched "lead" profiles.

How reports are stored

Each scan produces one report stored against a random, unguessable link. Anyone with the link can view that report, so share it only with people you trust. Your dashboard keeps recent scans in your own browser; removing a card there removes it from your browser immediately.

Community Link Graph

When we scan a site, we sometimes notice it linking to, or being named alongside, other businesses on the open web. If enough scans independently notice the same connection, we keep a record of it: domain A links to domain B, or domain A and domain B compete for the same customers. Over time this builds a shared map of how businesses on the web relate to each other, and we use that map to give a better estimate of a site's authority than we could from any single scan alone.

Here's the actual benefit: authority estimates get better the more this map fills in. A newer or smaller business is easier to place fairly once we've seen a handful of other sites point to it, instead of guessing from one crawl in isolation. This is the same kind of improvement search engines themselves get from looking at the whole web instead of one page at a time, applied to giving you a more accurate score.

What's in it, and what isn't

• In it: which domain links to which, which domains compete for similar customers, and which directory listings match a scanned business. All of this comes from pages we or someone else's scan actually crawled.
• Not in it: WHOIS records, registrant names, contact details, or any attempt to figure out who owns a domain. We store domain names, not people.
• Not in it: anything about a domain that was never scanned and never linked to by a scanned site. We don't go looking for domains to add; they only appear as exhaust from audits that were already running for their own reason.

This map is built from what our own scans and Common Crawl's public archive happen to see, not a full index of the web. Small or rarely-linked sites may take longer to show up, or may never show up at all, and that's expected: it's an approximation that improves with use, not a comprehensive directory.

A link we recorded a year or more ago and haven't seen again since gets deleted automatically. We don't keep a permanent record of a connection that no longer shows up anywhere on the live web.

If you don't want your domain included

If you own a domain and don't want it in this map, you can have it removed. Because we don't have accounts or logins for domains we didn't scan, we verify a removal request the same way search engines verify site ownership: by asking you to publish a specific file on your own domain. Here's how:

1. Create a plain text file named good-marketer-verification.txt.
2. Put exactly this text inside it, with nothing else in the file: good-marketer-domain-verification
3. Publish that file at this exact address on your domain: https://yourdomain.com/.well-known/good-marketer-verification.txt (replace yourdomain.com with your actual domain). Most website hosts and site builders let you upload a file to a specific folder; if you're not sure how on yours, ask your host or web developer to help you publish it at that path.
4. Email hello@goodmarketer.ca with the domain you'd like removed and confirmation that the file is live. We'll check it and, once it verifies, permanently delete every record we have of that domain in this map.

Publishing that file only proves you control the domain. We don't ask for your name, your login, or any other personal information to process a removal request.

Once removed, your domain stays out even if a future scan would otherwise have re-discovered the same connection. It won't quietly reappear.

Retention

We keep reports so your links keep working and so you can compare scores after re-scanning. If you want a report deleted from our servers entirely, email hello@goodmarketer.ca with the report link and we'll remove it within 7 days.

Crawler conduct

GoodMarketerBot identifies itself in its user agent, respects per-site timeouts and size limits, and reads a small, bounded number of pages per scan. If you run a website and want us to skip it, block our user agent in robots.txt or email us and we'll exclude it.