Each business we host a website for decides what it publishes on its website and is responsible for that content. Google reviews work differently: we add them ourselves, as described below. Depending on the business's plan and on what it publishes, a website we host can show personal information such as:
- Google reviews: when a website on our Growth or Premium plan is connected to the business's Google listing, we copy reviews of the business from Google and show them on the website. We connect the listing ourselves, and Google decides which of the business's reviews it makes available to us. Each review is shown with the reviewer's name as it appears on Google, their star rating, the review text, how long ago it was posted, and a link to the review on Google Maps. Some website designs also show the reviewer's Google profile photo, which visitors' browsers load directly from Google, so Google receives the visitor's IP address. On the Premium plan, the business can hide individual reviews from its website; on the Growth plan, it cannot choose which reviews appear. These reviews are shown only while the website is live on a plan that includes them and is connected to the business's Google listing. If the website moves to a plan without Google reviews, its subscription is canceled or paused, it is taken offline, or its listing is disconnected or changed, the website stops showing those reviews, and our next daily update deletes our copies of them, unless another website we host still shows reviews from the same listing.
- Testimonials: customer quotes that the business adds itself, shown with the name the business enters and, if the business adds them, a star rating or a short description of the customer.
- Contact details: the business's email address, phone number, street address, and social media links, which can be personal information when one person runs the business.
- Other text and photos: anything else the business writes or uploads, such as a page that tells its owner's story, or photos of its owner or staff.
What visitors send through a website's contact form is not published. On our clients' websites, it goes privately to the business, as described in Websites We Host for Our Clients. Sample websites have no working contact form, as described below.
Published content is public. Anyone can see what a website shows, and search engines and AI crawlers can read it. On some plans, we also publish a website's content in formats made for search engines and AI tools, such as structured data, and these can repeat the testimonials and contact details on its pages. By default, the robots.txt file we publish for each of our clients' websites also allows AI model-training crawlers, which collect public web pages that may be used to train AI models. The business can opt its website out of AI model training from the client portal, and AI search and assistant crawlers stay allowed either way, apart from the exceptions our Terms explain for Google's Gemini and for crawlers with more than one use. Our Terms of Service explain this in AI Crawlers and Model Training. Please note:
- A voluntary standard: robots.txt is a voluntary standard. Reputable AI companies follow it, but we cannot force every crawler to comply, and the opt-out covers only the AI model-training crawlers on our list.
- Not retroactive: Opting out does not remove content that has already been collected, and neither does changing or removing information on the website later.
- Websites kept out of search results: if a live website we host is marked to stay out of search results, we mark each of its pages with a request that search engines not list it. That request is on its pages only, not on the separate text files with its content that we publish for AI tools on some plans. Its robots.txt file follows the same rules as any other client's website, so the crawlers it allows can still read its pages, because that is how they see the request, and anyone who has the website's address can still visit it. Sample websites work differently, as described below.
Sample websites. To show a business that is not yet our client what we could build for it, we sometimes make a sample website from public information about the business, mostly from its Google listing: its name, contact details, and opening hours, photos from the listing, and some of its Google reviews. We may also use an AI tool to write the sample's text from that information. On a sample website:
- Each review is shown with only the reviewer's first name and the initial of their last name, such as "Maria G." (a name that is a single word on Google is shown as that word). The reviews are copies. We do not refresh them from Google, so editing or deleting a review on Google does not change the sample.
- We ask search engines not to list the sample, and the robots.txt file we publish for it asks all crawlers, including search engines and AI crawlers, to stay out of the whole website. Anyone who has its address can still visit it while it is available. The photos we copied for it are stored as public files, so anyone who has a photo's exact web address can open it until the photo is deleted.
- It has no working contact form. In its place, the sample shows a short note saying that it is a sample website, and while the sample is available, our server refuses messages sent to it, so no messages or contact details are collected through it. Our website analytics, including session recordings, still run on it, as on the other websites we host.
- It is available only for a limited time, usually 30 days from when we make it. Once 30 days have passed since it expired, we delete its content: its pages and text, the copied reviews and the reviewers' names, and the photos from the listing (unless another website we host also uses them). Our daily cleanup does this, starting with the samples that expired first, so when many samples are due at the same time, deleting all of them can take a few more days. Once its content is deleted, the sample can no longer be restored.
- Once twelve months have passed since it expired, we also delete what is left of the sample's own record: the sample's web address, the business's name, the publicly available phone number and email address we found for it, and how we found the business. Our daily cleanup does this too, in the same order. If the business has become our client, or the record is linked to other records we keep, such as an account, a subscription, or a support request, the cleanup leaves the record in place and a member of our staff reviews it instead. The business can ask us to delete its sample and this record sooner. Deleting this record does not remove the business from the list of businesses we contact about our services, which we keep separately, as described in Data Retention.
- If the business becomes our client and its sample becomes its website, we remove the Google reviews we copied into the sample when that happens. The rest of the sample's content can stay on the website, such as the photos from the listing and the sample's text, including any text an AI tool wrote from the listing and its reviews (the tool is not given the reviewers' names). If the client's plan includes Google reviews, the website then shows the reviews that Google provides through the business's connected listing, as described above.
Asking for your information to be removed. If your personal information appears on a website we host and you want it corrected or removed:
- For anything the business published itself, ask the business that owns the website. It can change or remove what it has published.
- If it is a Google review you wrote, email us at website-services@experienceflows.ai. We will delete the copy of it that we keep for our clients' websites, which takes it off every client website that shows Google reviews from that listing, and add the review to a do-not-store list. While it is on that list, we do not store it again, whether for a client's website or for a new sample website. The entry on that list holds only Google's identifiers for the review and for the business's Google listing, the reason (your request or a legal request), which member of our staff added it, and when. It holds no name and no review text, and we keep it until you ask us to remove it. If we hold no copy of your review, we will tell you so. We cannot yet add a review we have never stored to that list, so if it appears on a website we host later, email us again. You can also edit or delete the review on Google: our next daily update from Google will then update or delete our copy.
- If your information is on a sample website, email us at website-services@experienceflows.ai and we will delete the sample altogether or, if you only want your review taken off, remove your review from it.
- You can also email us at website-services@experienceflows.ai about anything else. We will pass your request on to the business and, as the website's host, help it act on your request.