Privacy Policy

The short version

• We request access to your products and content, plus your theme and script tags to check your storefront. We never read customer names, emails or addresses. Order data is read only if you grant two optional features (section 2), and only as totals and traffic sources.
• On the Free plan, product fixes come from deterministic rules on our servers. On Growth and Pro, product details and search queries are sent to AI providers to write and fact-check copy (section 6). Neither provider trains models on it.
• We look up your own products in Shopify's public AI catalog, the index AI shopping agents search, and keep only what we work out from it (section 2), never the catalog's search results, images or other stores' offers.
• Nothing is written to your store without an approval: yours for each change, or a schedule you switched on.
• Uninstalling revokes our access immediately; your store's data is permanently erased when Shopify's erasure request arrives, 48 hours after you uninstall.

1. Who we are

Yieldso ("we", "us") provides SEO and answer-engine optimisation software for Shopify stores. This policy covers the Yieldso Shopify app, the Yieldso web application, and this website.

2. What we access from your Shopify store

When you install the app you grant these Shopify access scopes, and no others: read_products, write_products, read_content, write_content, write_online_store_navigation (301 redirects), read_themes (to detect Yieldso's app embed and the structured data your theme already outputs), read_script_tags (to identify apps that load scripts on your storefront, for speed attribution), and write_pixels and read_customer_events (for optional order counting, section 7).

Two further scopes are optional and are requested only when you switch on the feature that needs them: write_themes, for the robots.txt editor, and read_orders, for revenue attribution.

We read, for each product:

• Title, handle, description, vendor, product type, tags and options
• SEO title and meta description
• Image URLs and their alt text
• Price range and currency, variant SKUs, barcodes and availability
• Review-rating metafields, where a reviews app stores them
• Publication status and storefront URL

We also read your collections, blog articles and pages: title, body, author, SEO title and meta description, publication status and URL. We read your store's public pages the way a shopper would, to check them.

Shopify's AI catalog. Each day we look up your Online Store products in Shopify's Global Catalog, the public index of Shopify products that AI shopping agents search, by their storefront address or variant ID, and count how many of your store's products it holds. On Pro, for products whose catalog listing is shared with other stores, we also read that listing's offers, and search the catalog for the product's name to see which offer it features and whether the same item is listed apart. The catalog is public, and these lookups are about your own products. To check your store against Shopify's requirements for AI channels, we read your refund, shipping, privacy and terms policy pages the way a shopper would, and, with the access above, your Shopify plan name, the countries you ship to, whether checkout requires a customer login and whether your storefront is password-protected.

From all of this we keep only what we work out (section 3). We never keep the catalog's search results, product images, or other stores' offers, titles or images.

We write to your store only what you approve, or what a schedule you switched on publishes:

• Product SEO title, meta description, tags and image alt text
• A "Key details" addition appended to a product description (your original text is kept)
• SEO title and meta description of collections, articles and pages
• Edits to an article or page body (an opening answer, or question-style headings)
• Blog articles, created as unpublished drafts
• URL redirects (301)
• Structured-data metafields in Yieldso's own namespace, on products, articles and pages
• An HTML sitemap page, if you create one
• Your theme's robots.txt.liquid template, only if you grant the optional write_themes permission and apply a robots.txt change. We keep the file that was there and can put it back in one click. This is the only theme file Yieldso edits; everything else Yieldso adds to your storefront (structured data, the speed beacon, speed boost) runs through Yieldso's app embeds, which you switch on in the theme editor.
• A Shopify customer-events pixel, if you switch on order counting (section 7)

Every write is recorded in the change log in the app, with the value before and after, and can be reverted.

We never request access to customer records, checkouts, payments, fulfilment or financial data. Shopify enforces this: without those scopes the data is not available to us even if we asked for it.

Revenue attribution (optional, Growth and Pro). If you switch it on and grant read_orders, we read your orders from the last 60 days, then new orders as they come in. For each order we read only its date, total and currency, and Shopify's customer-journey summary: the landing page, the traffic source and its type, whether a marketing campaign was involved, and the utm medium. We keep only daily totals per landing page and source; no order IDs, customer names, emails or addresses are read or stored.

3. What we store about you

• Store record — your myshopify domain, shop name, primary domain, contact email, country and currency, taken from Shopify at install.
• Account — an email address and display name, used to identify you.
• Catalogue mirror — the product fields listed above, so scoring runs without repeatedly calling Shopify.
• Change history — for every write: the original value, the new value, who approved it and when. Inside the Shopify admin, "who" is the staff member's Shopify user ID.
• AI catalog results — facts we work out from Shopify's AI catalog, not copies of it: whether each product is listed and since when, its listing ID, whether it has a rating, is sold out or shares its listing with other stores, the likely cause when it's missing, a daily count for the trend, the results of the eligibility checklist, and the suggested category for products without one. For each feature or spec Shopify's AI wrote about one of your products, we keep the line's text and our check's verdict. On Pro, for shared listings: whether your offer was featured, the featured store's name and price, and where your price sits among the offers (its rank, and the lowest, median and highest price).
• Storefront speed data — only if you enable the speed app embed (see section 7).
• Search Console metrics — only if you connect it (see section 5).
• Order totals — only if you switch on revenue attribution (section 2) or order counting (section 7): daily order totals per landing page and source and, for each AI-referred order, the day, the assistant, the landing page, the total, the currency and a one-way hash of the order ID.
• Operational logs — errors and request diagnostics, retained short-term for debugging.

4. Access tokens

Your Shopify access token is encrypted before it is written to our database, using a key held outside the database. It is decrypted in memory only for the duration of a call to Shopify, and is never written to logs. On uninstall the token is deleted.

5. Google Search Console (optional)

If you choose to connect Search Console, we request read-only access (webmasters.readonly) and store daily click, impression, position and query totals for your site so we can show whether a change improved traffic. We never modify your Search Console property. Disconnect at any time from inside the app; the stored metrics are deleted with your account. Google's handling of your data is governed by Google's privacy policy.

6. Artificial intelligence

Free plan: product fixes (meta titles, descriptions, alt text, tags and structured data) are produced by deterministic rules on our servers, and no product data is sent to an AI provider for them.

Growth and Pro: to write product copy, a product's title, type, vendor, tags, options, description and the search queries it appears for are sent to a large language model on Microsoft Azure OpenAI. The copy and those same facts are then sent to TypeSafe, which checks every claim against your product data before anything is proposed. This runs as part of the daily catalogue analysis, not only when you ask.

Also on Growth and Pro, two checks send product data to TypeSafe. To suggest a category for a product without one, it receives the product's title, type, vendor, tags and description, the titles of a few similar products in your store, and a shortlist of categories from Shopify's taxonomy. To check what Shopify's AI says about a product, it receives each line Shopify's AI wrote and the product's own details.

Other features also call Azure OpenAI with the content they work on: site profiling, content rewrites, article drafting (Pro, including the content calendar if you switch it on) and written explanations. Azure OpenAI is used in a business tier where inputs are not used to train models, and TypeSafe does not train on the data it checks.

7. Storefront speed and AI visit measurement (optional)

If you enable the "Yieldso performance" app embed in your theme, it measures page speed (Core Web Vitals) in your shoppers' browsers and sends it to us through your own store's domain. We keep only daily totals per page type and device class. We do not store IP addresses, identifiers, cookies or anything that identifies a shopper, and the embed sets no cookies.

The same embed counts visits that AI assistants send to your store (such as ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Copilot and Claude). When a visit arrives from one, the browser sends only the assistant's web address or link tag, the link's utm medium, whether the link was an ad click (a yes or no, never the click reference itself), whether the link came from Shopify's catalog (a yes or no; the catalog's search ID is never sent), the page it landed on (without its query string) and the page type. We keep daily totals per assistant and landing page, with clicks on your own ads inside an assistant (such as ChatGPT ads) counted apart. Nothing is stored in the shopper's browser.

When an AI crawler (for example OpenAI's, Anthropic's or Perplexity's) requests a file Yieldso serves on your domain, such as llms.txt, we count the request by the crawler's published name. We keep daily totals only, and no addresses.

If you switch on order counting, Yieldso adds a Shopify customer-events pixel. It runs only when the shopper allows analytics. It remembers, for that visit only, whether the visit started from an AI assistant and which store page it landed on, and when an order is placed it reports the referring site, utm source and medium, whether it was an ad click, whether the link came from Shopify's catalog (a yes or no), and landing page of that visit, the order total and currency, and the order ID. We store the order ID only as a one-way (SHA-256) hash, to count each order once. No name, email, address or other customer detail is sent. Switching it off removes the pixel.

8. Sub-processors

Application data is stored on servers we operate. We do not sell data, and we do not share it for advertising.

9. Retention and deletion

• While installed — speed checks, AI-visit counts, the daily AI catalog count, crawl and store-change history and alerts are deleted once they are older than your plan's history window (60 days on Free, 90 on Growth, 365 on Pro). Search Console data, the change log and change results are kept while the app is installed. Other AI catalog results are replaced each time the catalog is read, and a line Shopify's AI no longer writes is removed, unless one of your fixes answers it.
• Product-usage events — the app sends Yieldso (never a third party) which screens are opened, which upgrade prompts are shown, when a request fails, and how fast the app loads in your admin. They are tied to the store only, never to a person, and contain no product, customer, order or search data. They are deleted after 180 days.
• Support requests — the messages you send us from the app are kept with the store record, so we can follow up.
• On uninstall — Shopify notifies us, we mark the store uninstalled and delete the access token immediately.
• 48 hours after uninstall — Shopify sends a shop redaction request. When it arrives we permanently delete the store record, its catalogue mirror, its change history, its stored credentials and, where the account exists only for that store, the account itself. If the request never reaches us, a nightly job erases any store still uninstalled seven days later.
• Customer redaction requests — we hold no customer records, so there is nothing to erase. We acknowledge and log every such request.

10. Your rights

Depending on where you live you may have rights to access, correct, export or delete your personal data, and to object to or restrict processing. Contact us and we will respond within the period required by law. You can also exercise deletion directly by uninstalling the app.

11. Cookies and local storage

This website uses no advertising or third-party tracking cookies. The web application stores a session token and interface preferences in your browser's local storage so you stay signed in; that data never leaves your device except as the authentication token sent to our API. Inside the Shopify admin, authentication uses short-lived session tokens issued by Shopify.

12. Security

Traffic is encrypted in transit. Access tokens are encrypted at rest. Each store's data is isolated by a tenant boundary enforced centrally in our data layer, so one store's data cannot be returned to another. No system is perfectly secure, and we do not claim otherwise.

13. Children

Yieldso is a business tool and is not directed at anyone under 16.

14. Changes to this policy

If we make a material change we will update the date at the top of this page and, where the change meaningfully affects you, notify you in the app.

15. Contact

Privacy questions or requests: privacy@yieldso.com.