Privacy

Short version: analytics counts visits, and forms turn what you submit into email. No account, no newsletter, no advertising, and no personal data sold.

What is collected

Google Analytics 4, and nothing else. It records the pages you visit, roughly where in the world you are, what kind of device and browser you used, and which site or search sent you. It sets cookies in your browser to recognise a repeat visit.

We look at it for one reason: which reports get read, and whether AI assistants are sending anyone. That is the same question the publication exists to measure, turned on itself.

What is not

No account, no login, no newsletter. There is nothing here to sign up for, so there is no email address to hold.
No advertising and no retargeting. Google’s advertising features are switched off in our configuration — bothallow_google_signals and allow_ad_personalization_signals are set to false, so the data is not fed into ad audiences and you will not be followed around the internet because you read a page here.
Nothing is sold or shared. Not with the firms we rank, not with anyone else. Firms are not told who looked at their page — they are not told they have a page.
The contact form stores nothing. What you type is turned into an email and passed on; it is not written to a database, added to a mailing list, or used for anything else. There is no mailing list to add you to.

Who else sees it

Google, as the analytics provider, and Vercel, which hosts the site and keeps standard server logs. Both are processors acting on our behalf. Messages sent through the contact form go to the publisher’s own inbox and nowhere else — see ownership and funding for who that is. If you request a private study, the information you submit is used to answer that request. It is not added to a mailing list or sold.

How to stop it

Any tracker blocker, or Google’s own opt-out add-on, will block the analytics entirely. Nothing on this site depends on it — every report, table and download works with JavaScript switched off altogether, because the pages are built to be readable by crawlers that never run it.

There is not one. We judged that a cookie wall on a research publication that runs basic analytics and no advertising would cost every reader a click to protect them from a page count. If you are reading from somewhere that expects an explicit prompt, treat this page as the disclosure and the opt-out above as the control.

That is a judgement, not a legal opinion, and it is the kind of thing we would rather state plainly than bury. If it changes, it changes here first.

Questions

Use the contact form. It handles corrections too.