What we collect, and what we deliberately do not.

This page covers the Citon website and the Gap Report request that runs from it. The operating entity is not yet named here, and will be before this site is public.

There is one way to reach us and it posts to this site. The Gap Report form is the whole of it: no embedded scheduler, no third-party widget, nothing that hands what you type to another company before it reaches us. Clause 4 lists every host your browser does contact and says exactly when.

The Gap Report form asks four questions, and it is worth listing all four rather than summarising them:

• Your work email. Where the report and the call invite go.
• Your company domain. The measurement is anchored to it.
• The company an AI assistant names first in your category. This one asks you to name a third party, and often that party is a competitor. We use the name as an input to the measurement, which is the only reason it is asked for. We do not tell them, and we do not publish it.
• Your category and the questions your buyers ask. These become the queries we run.

We use those four things to run the report and to talk to you about it. Nothing else.

We do not sell it, rent it, or pass it to a data broker, an enrichment service or an advertising network. We do not add you to a list you did not ask to be on.

Analytics. This site runs Google Analytics 4 through Google Tag Manager to count how many people read each page. What it does depends on where you are. Outside the EEA (including Réunion, Guadeloupe, Martinique, French Guiana, Mayotte, Saint Martin and the Åland Islands), the UK, Jersey, Guernsey, the Isle of Man, Gibraltar, Switzerland and Canada, analytics is on by default and Google Analytics sets the two first-party cookies listed below. Inside those regions it starts switched off and sets no analytics cookie unless you choose Accept on the cookie banner. Either way Google receives your IP address, the page you viewed, the page you came from and basic browser details such as language and screen size. It never receives anything you typed into this site.

Switchfrog. We also use Switchfrog, a product analytics service, to see how visitors move through our pages so we can find where the site gets in the way. When it runs it records the pages you open and how you interact with them (clicks, pointer movement, scrolling, and key presses as counts and lengths rather than the characters), whether a visit looks like a person or an automated agent, and the requests the page makes to our own servers, which can include what you send in the Gap Report form. It follows the same choice as Google Analytics: it loads only when analytics may run, never after you decline, and if you decline while it is running it stops on that page and clears what it stored, in every open tab of this site. Switchfrog sets no cookie; it keeps an anonymous visit identifier in your browser's session storage and IndexedDB, both listed below. Switchfrog processes this for us as our service provider, under its agreement with us. Its privacy policy explains how it handles that data.

What this site stores in your browser. These are all of it, by name:

• _ga, a cookie set by Google Analytics on citon.ai. It holds a random number that tells your browser's visits apart from other browsers', so a returning reader is counted once rather than as someone new. It lasts two years.
• _ga_3DX19Z64HT, a cookie set by Google Analytics on citon.ai. It keeps track of the current visit, so the pages you read in one sitting count as one session. It lasts two years.
• citon_cookie_consent, a local storage entry written only if you answer the cookie banner. It holds your answer, "all" for Accept or "essential" for Reject, so the banner does not ask again. It lasts until you clear this site's data in your browser.
• switchfrog:browser:sdk, the start of the names of two session storage entries Switchfrog writes while it runs. They hold an anonymous identifier for the current visit and mark it as active, so the pages you read in one sitting count as one visit. It lasts until you close the tab, and Reject deletes them at once.
• switchfrog:browser:sdk, an IndexedDB database Switchfrog keeps while it runs, which is browser storage and not a cookie. It is where the Switchfrog script keeps its anonymous visit identifier between pages. It lasts until you clear this site's data in your browser, and Reject deletes it at once.
• switchfrog:browser:sdk, also the start of the name of a local storage entry Switchfrog writes and removes in the same instant, to tell your other open tabs of this site that the visit changed. It holds nothing but the value 1 and carries no identifier. It lasts no time at all: it is removed the moment it is written.
• switchfrog:collection-permission:, the start of the name of a local storage entry Switchfrog writes when you choose Reject, which this site then deletes straight away. It holds only your refusal and a random identifier the script generates each time it writes the entry, which links to nothing else. It lasts no longer than the Reject that wrote it, because this site removes it in the same step.

Neither analytics cookie is set inside the EEA (including Réunion, Guadeloupe, Martinique, French Guiana, Mayotte, Saint Martin and the Åland Islands), the UK, Jersey, Guernsey, the Isle of Man, Gibraltar, Switzerland and Canada unless you accept. Switchfrog follows the same rule, so inside the EEA (including Réunion, Guadeloupe, Martinique, French Guiana, Mayotte, Saint Martin and the Åland Islands), the UK, Jersey, Guernsey, the Isle of Man, Gibraltar, Switzerland and Canada it writes none of its storage entries, and it never sets a cookie, unless you accept. That list is complete: citon.ai stores nothing else in your browser.

Turning it off. Whether the cookie banner appears, and whether analytics cookies are set before you answer it, both follow where you are by your IP address, the same signal Google uses. The regions where analytics starts switched off and the banner asks first are the EEA (including Réunion, Guadeloupe, Martinique, French Guiana, Mayotte, Saint Martin and the Åland Islands), the UK, Jersey, Guernsey, the Isle of Man, Gibraltar, Switzerland and Canada. Google and this site's host each look up your IP address in their own location data, so near a border or behind a VPN they can occasionally place you differently. When the host sends no country at all, or the check fails or takes longer than about three seconds, the banner goes by your browser's time zone instead. On the banner, Accept turns analytics cookies on, and Reject turns them off for this site from then on, including on later visits. Cookies already in your browser stay until they expire or you delete them, and after Reject this site stops refreshing them. The banner asks once and does not come back after you answer. Nowhere else on this site offers a cookie settings link. To change your answer, clear this site's cookies and data in your browser, and the banner will ask again if you are in one of those regions. Wherever you are, you can also block or delete cookies for citon.ai in your browser settings, or install the Google Analytics Opt-out Browser Add-on, which Google publishes and which stops Google Analytics on every site you visit.

Being honest about this is the point of the section. An HTTP request necessarily carries your IP address to whoever answers it, so every host your browser reaches is worth naming. They split into two groups, and the split is the part that matters: some you cannot avoid, and some are reached only if you choose to do something.

Reached on every page load, whether you act or not.

• fonts.googleapis.com, which serves the stylesheet that describes two of the typefaces this site renders in.
• fonts.gstatic.com, which serves the font files for those two typefaces, and is reached because the stylesheet above points at it rather than because this site names it.
• stijndv.com, which serves the display typeface this site renders headings in.
• img.logo.dev, which serves the company logos shown in the diagrams, requested by domain name.
• www.googletagmanager.com, which loads Google Tag Manager, which loads Google Analytics 4. Outside the EEA (including Réunion, Guadeloupe, Martinique, French Guiana, Mayotte, Saint Martin and the Åland Islands), the UK, Jersey, Guernsey, the Isle of Man, Gibraltar, Switzerland and Canada it sets two first-party analytics cookies by default; inside those regions it sets none unless you accept the cookie banner. Either way Google sees your IP address and the page you viewed, and never anything you typed.
• www.google-analytics.com, which receives the Google Analytics 4 measurement that Tag Manager sends, carrying your IP address, the page you viewed, basic browser details and, where analytics cookies are allowed, the random visitor number held in the _ga cookie, but never anything you typed.
• api.switchfrog.com, which loads Switchfrog, a product analytics service, under the same choice as Google Analytics, and receives what it records: the pages you open, clicks, pointer movement and scrolling, key presses as counts and lengths rather than the characters, whether a visit looks like a person or an automated agent, and the requests the page makes to our own servers, which can include what you send in the Gap Report form.

Most of those are a font or an image request. The two Google hosts are the analytics described in clause 3, and they are the only ones that set a cookie, under the rules set out there. Apart from api.switchfrog.com, which can receive what you send in the Gap Report form as described in clause 3, none of these receives anything you typed. They are on the list because they see your request, which is enough to be worth telling you.

Reached only when you do something. Never on load.

• slack.com, which receives the four answers submitted through the Gap Report form, so the request reaches our own team.
• www.wikidata.org, which is linked from the Organization schema's sameAs field as our verified entity record; a visitor following that link reaches Wikidata, not us.
• twitter.com, which is where the share button on a blog post sends a visitor who chooses to post the link, and is contacted only on that click.
• t.me, which is where the share button on a blog post sends a visitor who chooses to post the link, and is contacted only on that click.
• www.linkedin.com, which is where the share button on a blog post sends a visitor who chooses to post the link, and is contacted only on that click.
• news.ycombinator.com, which is where the submit button on a blog post sends a visitor who chooses to post the link, and is contacted only on that click.
• claude.ai, which opens a new chat prefilled with a prompt naming this post, if a visitor chooses Open in Claude, so that prompt and the fact they were reading this post reach Anthropic.
• chatgpt.com, which opens a new chat prefilled with a prompt naming this post, if a visitor chooses Open in ChatGPT, so that prompt and the fact they were reading this post reach OpenAI.
• switchfrog.com, which is where the link to Switchfrog's own privacy policy in clause 3 goes, and is contacted only if you follow it.

Nothing on this site is embedded from any of those, and your browser reaches none of them unless you act. Most are plain links out: the share destinations on a blog post header, and the Wikidata entry our structured data points at. Following one hands you to that company exactly as any link would, and staying put hands them nothing.

Slack is the one worth reading twice, because it is the only entry there that receives something you typed, and it is not a fetch your browser makes at all. When you submit the Gap Report form, this site posts your answers to our own Slack from our server, so they reach our team while your browser never contacts slack.com. It is listed because a privacy page that names only what a browser fetches would omit a real recipient of your data, and that omission is the kind that matters.

There is no embedded scheduler on this site and no third-party frame of any kind. A booking calendar was embedded here until 2026-08-30, which is why this clause is written to separate hosts you cannot avoid from hosts you reach only by acting. If anything embedded ever returns, that split is where it has to be declared.

A Gap Report request and the report produced from it are kept while we are working with you and for twelve months afterwards, so that a later measurement can be compared against the baseline we took. After that we delete it. You can ask us to delete it sooner and we will, including the baseline, which means we lose the ability to prove a later result.

Ask and we will tell you what we hold, correct it, send you a copy of it, or delete it. We will not ask you to justify the request or route you through a form designed to make you give up.

If you are in the UK or the EU, the UK GDPR and the GDPR give you those rights as a matter of law rather than as a courtesy, and they also give you the right to complain to your data protection authority. Our lawful basis for handling a Gap Report request is the legitimate interest of responding to someone who contacted us about buying something.

A contact address for privacy requests is not published on this page yet. Until it is, use the Gap Report request on the home page and say what you need; it reaches the same people.

If we start collecting something we do not collect today, this page changes before that happens rather than after, and the date at the top changes with it. A privacy page updated in arrears is a disclosure that arrived too late to be one.