Privacy Policy

Short version: we publish a free daily AI brief for car dealers. We collect your email when you ask for the brief, the details you type into our contact forms, and basic, mostly anonymous traffic data. We do not sell your personal information. You can unsubscribe or ask us to delete your data at any time by emailing hello@dealeraiguy.com.

This policy explains what "Dealer AI Guy" ("we," "us," "our") collects when you visit dealeraiguy.com and its subdomains (the "Site"), why we collect it, who we share it with, and the choices you have. It applies to the Site, our email newsletters, and the forms we run on them. It does not apply to third-party websites we link to, which have their own policies.

1. Information you give us

We only receive what you choose to type in. Specifically:

Newsletter signup. Your email address, plus which page or campaign you signed up from. That is the entire requirement — no name, no phone, no dealership.
Training and consulting inquiries. When you use the form on our training or consulting pages: your name, email address, dealership or company, your role, and whatever you write in the message field.
Directory intro requests. When you ask us to introduce you to a company listed in the Dealer AI Company Directory: your name, email address, dealership, role, and your message.
Directory listing submissions. When a company asks to be listed or to claim a profile: company name, website, category, the submitter's name and email, and any message.
Vendor reviews. When a dealership operator reviews a company in the directory: your name, email address, dealership, role, your ratings, and your written review.
Direct correspondence. Anything you send us by email.

Please do not send us customer records, deal jackets, credit applications, driver's license images, or any other consumer data from your dealership. We do not want it, we are not equipped to be your service provider for it, and we will delete it if we receive it.

2. Information collected automatically

When you load a page, our own server records a lightweight, non-identifying row: the date, the page path, the referring website's domain (never the full URL), any utm_source and utm_campaign values in the link you followed, and whether the request looked like a bot. We do not store your IP address or a device identifier in that record, and we do not use it to build a profile of you.

Our hosting provider, Cloudflare, processes your IP address and request headers to route and protect traffic, as any web host must. The third-party analytics and advertising tools described below set their own cookies and receive their own data.

3. Cookies and similar technologies

The Site uses a small number of third-party cookies and tags:

Google Analytics 4 — aggregate traffic measurement: which pages get read, roughly where readers come from, and how they move through the Site.
Meta Pixel — measures whether our advertising on Facebook and Instagram actually produces subscribers, and lets us build advertising audiences.
Klaviyo — powers the newsletter, including whether emails are delivered, opened, and clicked.
Cloudflare — security and performance.

We do not set advertising cookies of our own, we do not run a third-party ad network on the Site, and we do not use cookies to track you across unrelated websites beyond what the Meta Pixel does for our own ad measurement. You can block or delete cookies in your browser settings; the Site works fine without them, apart from the measurement described here. We honor Global Privacy Control (GPC) signals where the law requires us to.

4. How we use your information

To send you the daily brief, the weekly recap, and related email you asked for.
To answer your training, consulting, or directory inquiry — including making the introduction you asked us to make.
To publish approved vendor reviews (see section 6).
To understand which stories and tools readers find useful, so we can publish better ones.
To measure and improve our advertising.
To keep the Site secure, prevent spam and abuse, and comply with the law.

We do not use your information to make automated decisions that produce legal or similarly significant effects about you.

We do not sell your personal information, and we never rent or trade our subscriber list. We share information only in these situations:

Service providers who run the Site for us, under contract and only to do their job: Cloudflare (hosting, database, security), Klaviyo (email delivery and subscriber management), Google (analytics), and Meta (advertising measurement). When we send a conversion event to Meta, your email address is hashed before it leaves our server; Meta also receives your IP address and browser user-agent as part of that request.
The company you asked us to introduce you to. If you submit an intro request on a directory profile, we pass that company your name, email, dealership, role, and message — and nothing else. We do not hand your details to any other listed company, and companies cannot buy access to our reader list.
When the law requires it, or to protect our rights, safety, or property.
In a business transfer, if the publication is ever sold or merged. You would be notified, and this policy would continue to govern your information until it is replaced.

Some privacy laws, including the California Consumer Privacy Act as amended, define "sharing" broadly enough to cover the Meta advertising measurement described above. You can opt out of that at any time by emailing us, by using your browser's Global Privacy Control setting, or by blocking third-party cookies.

6. Information you make public

If we approve a vendor review you submit, we publish your name, your role, your dealership, your ratings, and your review text on that company's directory profile. We do not publish your email address — we use it only to verify that you are a real operator and to contact you if there is a question about the review. Do not include anything in a review you would not want a vendor, a competitor, or your employer to read. If you later want a published review removed, email us and we will take it down.

7. How long we keep it

Subscriber records are kept for as long as you are subscribed, and for a reasonable period afterward so we can honor your unsubscribe. Inquiry, intro-request, and listing-submission records are kept while we work with you and afterward for our business records. Approved reviews stay published until you or we remove them. Aggregate page-view rows contain no personal information and are kept indefinitely for traffic history. When you ask us to delete your data, we delete it from our systems and instruct our providers to do the same, except where we are legally required to keep a record.

8. Your choices and rights

Unsubscribe from any email using the link at the bottom of it. It works immediately, and it does not affect your access to anything on the Site.
Access, correction, deletion, and portability. Email hello@dealeraiguy.com and tell us what you want. We will verify your request by replying to the email address on file, and we respond within the time the applicable law allows — generally 30 to 45 days.
Opt out of "sale" or "sharing" for cross-context behavioral advertising, and of targeted advertising, by emailing us or sending a Global Privacy Control signal.
Withdraw consent at any time where we rely on it. Withdrawing consent does not affect processing that already happened.
Complain. If you are in the EEA or the UK, you may complain to your local data protection authority. We would rather you contact us first so we can fix it.

We will never charge you a different price, deny you content, or degrade your experience because you exercised a privacy right.

9. Legal bases (EEA and UK readers)

Where the UK GDPR or EU GDPR applies, we rely on: your consent for marketing email and non-essential cookies; our legitimate interests in operating, securing, measuring, and promoting an independent trade publication; the performance of a contract when you ask us for training, consulting, or an introduction; and legal obligation where a law requires us to act. The Site is operated from the United States, and our service providers process data in the United States, so using the Site involves an international transfer; we rely on our providers' Standard Contractual Clauses and equivalent safeguards for those transfers.

10. Security

The Site runs over HTTPS on Cloudflare's network. Form submissions are stored in an access-controlled database, API keys live server-side only, and administrative endpoints require a secret token. No system is perfectly secure, and we cannot guarantee that a determined attacker will never succeed — but we keep the amount of personal data we hold deliberately small, which is the most effective protection there is.

11. Children

The Site is a business publication for automotive retail professionals. It is not directed to children, and we do not knowingly collect personal information from anyone under 16. If you believe a child has given us information, email us and we will delete it.

12. AI systems and crawlers

We deliberately allow AI crawlers to read and index our published editorial content — that is stated in our robots.txt and llms.txt. That permission covers published articles, briefs, and directory profiles only. It does not cover anything you submit through a form, which is never published unless section 6 applies.

13. Changes to this policy

We update this policy when our practices change. The effective date at the top always reflects the current version. If a change materially affects how we handle information we already hold about you, we will say so in the newsletter before it takes effect.

14. Contact us

Privacy questions, requests, and complaints: hello@dealeraiguy.com. Write "Privacy request" in the subject line and we will route it correctly.