Privacy policy
Grounder sends web searches from AI agents and developers to search providers and returns what they find. This policy explains what Grounder collects, why, who else receives it, how long it is kept, and the choices you have. “We” and “us” mean Grounder.
What we collect
Your account. When you sign up with Google, GitHub or Apple, we receive your email address, your name if the provider shares it, and the identifier that provider uses for your account. We accept only an email address the provider has verified. We never see your password, and we keep no token from the provider.
Your searches. For each search made with your account, through the API or an MCP client such as Claude or ChatGPT, we store:
- the search query and the prompt your agent sent with it; through MCP, your latest message as you typed it;
- which providers ran, how long each took, and the URL, title and a snippet of up to 500 characters for each result;
- when it ran, and the account and search key that made it;
- what the client sends about itself: its name and version, the AI model, its user agent, and for some clients your approximate location, language and time zone;
- where you are and your time zone, if you tell your agent and it passes them on with the search;
- the chat and message the search came from, as one-way hashes, so follow-ups in the same chat can be counted;
- whether the search helped, if your agent reports it.
Anything in a prompt or query that looks like a password, key or token is replaced before it is stored.
What we don’t collect. We don’t store your IP address, your search keys (only a one-way hash of each), or the full text of the pages a search finds. Searches typed into the demo on grounder.net and on its provider pages are not stored at all.
Requests for access. If you asked for access before sign-up existed, we keep what you sent: your email and, if you gave them, your name, company, what you’re building and your training choice.
How we use it
- To run your searches and return the results.
- To route searches better. Once a day, each search’s query is answered from the results it got and that answer is graded against a reference answer, and the grades update shared statistics for each kind of query, which decide where later searches go. No model is trained on your data, and no other customer sees your searches.
- To run the service: signing you in, keeping your account secure, applying the free allowance and rate limits, preventing abuse and fixing problems.
- To contact you about your account or the service.
We don’t sell your data, and we don’t use it for advertising.
Who else receives it
- Search providers receive a search’s query and filters, never your account details, so they can run it. Each keeps what it receives under its own terms. The providers in use are listed on grounder.net.
- Live data sources receive, when a question needs a value only they hold right now (a market’s odds, a game’s score, a flight’s status, a service’s status), or on every search for one you set to Always on your account page, the search’s query or just the names in it they need, such as a team, a ticker, a flight number or a place, never your account details. They include Polymarket, Kalshi, ESPN, MLB, OpenF1, Coinbase, Yahoo Finance, Queue-Times.com, the US Geological Survey, the National Weather Service, the Federal Reserve, trumpstruth.org, the status pages of the services asked about, The Odds API, YouTube, Bluesky, FlightAware and Transitland, and, once Grounder holds their keys or you add your own, X, Threads, Finnhub, SeatGeek, Best Buy, the Associated Press and Twitch. OpenStreetMap’s Nominatim receives a place name to find where it is.
- TypeSafe runs Grounder’s routing model and receives the prompt and filters to decide where a search goes, and, when the search carries them, your approximate location (city, region and country, never coordinates), language and time zone, for a question that depends on where or when you are.
- Anthropic receives, within minutes of a search, its query and the prompt behind it, with no account or chat identifiers, so Claude can write the reference answer the search is graded against and check how Grounder’s routing model read the prompt.
- OpenRouter and the hosts it sends to receive, once a day, a search’s query and its top results, with no account or chat identifiers, so a model can answer the query from those results and grade the answer.
- Google Cloud hosts Grounder’s servers, database and backups, and holds its encryption keys.
- Cloudflare serves grounder.net and api.grounder.net and protects them from abuse.
- Google, GitHub and Apple confirm who you are when you sign in with them.
- Stripe processes payments when you add billing. You enter your card, name, email and billing address in Stripe’s own form, and Stripe keeps them under its own terms; Grounder never sees your card number and keeps only Stripe’s identifiers for your customer and subscription and the subscription’s status. Grounder sends Stripe the count of your searches past the free ones, never their queries, so Stripe can bill them.
We also disclose information when the law requires it, to protect people or the service, or to a buyer if the business is sold or merged.
How long we keep it
Search records are kept indefinitely, and so is a nightly backup of the whole database. Your account record is kept indefinitely too. A sign-in session ends after 30 days, and a sign-in that is not finished expires after 10 minutes.
How we protect it
Your email address and name are encrypted record by record, under keys held in Google Cloud’s key management service, and accounts are looked up by keyed hashes, not by email. A provider’s or live data source’s key you add on your account page is encrypted the same way, sent only to the service it belongs to, and never shown back beyond its last four characters. Search keys and sign-in tokens are stored only as one-way hashes. Data is encrypted in transit and at rest, and only the people and services that run Grounder can reach it.
Your choices
- Training. You can stop your searches being used to improve routing by sending
PUT /v1/account/trainingwith your key, or by writing to support@grounder.net. Searches keep working and are still logged. From the next day your searches are not graded, and those already graded stop counting in the shared statistics. - Access and correction. Write to support@grounder.net to ask what we hold about you, or to correct it.
- Deletion. Search records are kept indefinitely. Where the law gives you the right to have your information deleted, write to support@grounder.net and we’ll handle the request as that law requires.
Where it is stored
In the United States, on Google Cloud. If you use Grounder from another country, your information is transferred to the United States.
Children
Grounder is for people 18 and older, and we don’t knowingly collect information from anyone younger.
Changes
When this policy changes, the new version is posted here with its date, and account holders are emailed about significant changes.