Safety
What Acentics can see and change
What it reads, what it changes on your site, what it sends to AI providers, and how to undo any of it. Each answer describes how the product works today.
At a glance
- Reads
- Your public pages, and your Search Console data if you connect it. Read-only.
- Changes
- Tags in your pages (titles, descriptions, alt text, schema, canonicals), redirects and llms.txt, only through the installer you add.
- Sends to AI
- Page details to Claude when writing a fix. Your own prompts to the engines you connect.
- Stores
- Crawl results, fixes and their history, and your keys, encrypted.
The details
Read once before you install anything, and again whenever you like.
What does Acentics read?
- Your public pages. The crawler identifies itself as AcenticsBot, skips anything your robots.txt disallows, and slows down when robots.txt sets a crawl delay or your site answers that it's busy (429 or 503).
- Google Search Console, only if you connect it, with read-only access. Acentics can see clicks, impressions and rankings, and cannot change anything in your Search Console account.
- Your homepage, every 5 minutes, to check that it's up and that its SSL certificate is valid.
What does it change on my site?
- Nothing until you add an installer: a WordPress plugin, a Cloudflare Worker, or a few lines of PHP or Node. Acentics never logs in to your CMS or your server.
- The installer changes tags in the HTML your pages send: titles, meta descriptions, image alt text, FAQ schema and canonical tags. It also serves redirects you set up, your llms.txt if you publish one, and turns away AI crawlers you choose to block. It doesn't edit your code, your theme or the text of your pages.
- On WordPress you can also turn on write-back, which saves applied fixes into WordPress itself: your SEO plugin's title and description fields, and empty alt text in the media library. It's off until you switch it on, and alt text someone wrote is never replaced.
- AI-written fixes wait for a person to apply them. You can let one kind of fix apply on its own, but that's off until you switch it on, and a fix with any warning always waits.
- One change happens on its own: when a crawl finds the same page at two addresses that differ only by a query string or trailing slash, Acentics adds a canonical tag pointing at the main one. Later crawls revise these, and a canonical you set yourself is never changed.
- If the installer can't reach Acentics, your pages are served exactly as they are.
Can I undo a change?
- Yes. Every applied fix is recorded with what it replaced, who applied it and when. Revert puts back exactly what was there before.
- Removing the installer removes every change at once, because the changes only exist while the installer serves them. The exception is WordPress write-back: turn it off first, and Acentics puts back the old values, unless someone has edited a field in WordPress since, in which case that edit stays.
What is sent to AI providers?
- To write a fix, Acentics sends Claude (made by Anthropic) the page's address, its current title and description, its main heading, its language, and a short excerpt of its text.
- For an AI visibility check, only the prompt you wrote is sent, to the engines you connected (ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini or Perplexity), using your own API key.
How are keys and passwords stored?
- AI provider keys and Search Console sign-in tokens are encrypted with AES-256-GCM before they're saved.
- Passwords are stored only as Argon2id hashes, which can't be turned back into the password.
- Sign-in cookies are HttpOnly, so scripts on a page can't read them, and SameSite=Lax, so other websites can't use them to act as you.
What does AI crawler tracking collect?
- Nothing until you turn it on for a site. Then it counts requests from known AI crawlers, such as GPTBot and ClaudeBot: the bot's name, the page path, and how many visits a day.
- It doesn't record IP addresses, and human visitors are never counted.
What does real-visitor speed tracking collect?
- Nothing until you turn it on for a site. Then the Acentics script tag reports, once per page view, the page path and five timings (how fast the page loaded, responded and stayed stable), and the server notes whether the device is a phone.
- The timings aren't stored with an IP address, cookie or anything else that identifies the visitor, and they're deleted after 28 days.
How are payments handled?
- Payments go through Razorpay's checkout. You enter your payment details with Razorpay, and Acentics never sees them.
- Plans are paid in advance and never charge by themselves.
How do I delete my data?
- The workspace owner can delete the workspace from Settings. Acentics emails the owner a code to confirm, then deletes the workspace and its data: sites, crawls, fixes, keys and reports.
How your data is handled
What we collect, who processes it and how to delete it is in the Privacy Policy. The rules for using Acentics are in the Terms of Service.
Found a security problem?
Email us the details and how to reproduce it. A person reads every report, and we'll tell you what we did about it. Please don't test against sites or accounts that aren't yours.
support@acentics.com