EvidenceSeek Privacy Policy

Last updated: July 12, 2026

1.Introduction

EvidenceSeek ("we," "us," or "our") is a search tool for scientific literature, available at evidenceseek.com. This policy explains what information we handle when you use the site, how we use it, and the choices you have.

The short version: EvidenceSeek needs almost nothing from you. There are no accounts, no sign-ups, and no analytics or advertising trackers. We do not keep a record of what you search for.

If you have questions about this policy, contact us at privacy@evidenceseek.com.

2.Information we handle

Search and criteria content. When you use EvidenceSeek, you may provide a natural-language query, a hypothesis, structured PICO fields (population, intervention, comparator, and outcome), notes, edits to generated search criteria, or optional custom filter criteria. We use this content only to carry out your search and the follow-up features you choose to use, as described in Section 3.

EvidenceSeek is designed for literature research, not for handling patient records or other sensitive information. Do not include names, contact details, protected health information (including medical-record numbers or other patient details), confidential information, or other personal or identifying details in anything you submit.

Technical data. As with any website, our server automatically receives your device's IP address and standard request information when you use the site. We use your IP address only to apply usage limits and to keep the service secure. Our application logs record the IP address and time of a search request, but not the content of your query.

Performance telemetry. To monitor that the service is working, we keep a content-free operational record of each search: whether it succeeded or failed, how long it took, the search profile used, the number of results returned, and when it ran. This record contains no query content, no results, no IP address, and no identifier of any kind — it cannot be linked to you, and it exists only so we can track the site's speed and reliability.

Browser storage and cookies. We do not use advertising or analytics cookies, and we set no cookies that track you across sites or build a profile of you. The site uses a functional cookie to remember your light or dark theme preference when you choose one. It stores only that choice — the word "light" or "dark" — with no identifier and nothing about your searches. The cookie lasts about a year so the site can show your preferred theme on a return visit, and your browser sends it to our server on each request for the single purpose of rendering the page in the theme you picked. You can delete it at any time through your browser's settings.

Apart from that cookie, the site uses your browser's session storage and local storage to preserve work you have already started — so that a page refresh or accidental tab close doesn't lose your in-progress search. Storage is written in response to actions you take on the site (running a search, editing search criteria, requesting an explanation, applying a filter), and read only by the site running in your browser. Depending on what you do, this may include recent search results, filters and sorting choices, generated search criteria and your edits, generated explanations, optional custom filter criteria and their results, and other interface preferences. Most of this data is cleared when your browser session ends; some interface preferences may remain until you clear your browser storage.

Aside from the theme cookie described above, nothing from your browser's session or local storage is sent back to our servers. Where a feature does require sending content to us — for example, your edits to search criteria, or optional custom filter criteria — that happens at the moment you trigger the feature, separately from browser storage, and is handled as described in Section 3.

3.How your search is processed

To find and rank papers, EvidenceSeek sends your query to two kinds of outside services:

We send these providers your query text and the abstracts and metadata of candidate papers. We choose providers whose terms prohibit using data sent through their APIs to train their models. EvidenceSeek does not use your queries to train any AI model of its own.

Temporary processing. To run a search and support follow-up features such as on-demand explanations, we hold your search content and results briefly in the server's memory — for up to an hour — after which they are automatically discarded. To make repeated searches faster, we may cache limited information derived from your search. This cached information may reflect the subject of your search and remains until the cache is cleared. We do not keep your raw queries or results in any database or long-term record; the only thing that persists is the content-free performance record described in Section 2.

4.How information is shared

We do not sell your information, and we do not share it for advertising. We rely on a small number of service providers that process data on our behalf:

Your browser also contacts Cloudflare directly to load a bot-protection widget; see Section 5.

We may also disclose information if required by law, or where necessary to protect the security and integrity of the service.

5.Third-party content loaded by your browser

The site's fonts are served from our own servers, so displaying a page does not contact any third-party font provider. The site does contain links to external sites such as publisher pages, DOI links, and PubMed. Those sites have their own privacy practices, which this policy does not cover.

To check that requests come from a real browser rather than automated scripts, the site also loads Cloudflare's Turnstile widget from challenges.cloudflare.com. When it runs, your browser exchanges information with Cloudflare — typically your IP address, request headers, and limited interaction signals — to issue a short-lived verification token, which we then send back to Cloudflare to confirm before serving a result. See Cloudflare's Turnstile Privacy Policy for what they do with this information.

6.Data retention

Because there are no accounts, we keep very little. Queries and results exist only briefly, as described in Section 3. Server logs that record IP addresses are retained for up to seven days and then automatically deleted. Limited information derived from searches may remain on the server until the cache is cleared. The content-free performance records described in Section 2 contain nothing personal and are kept as anonymous operational statistics.

7.Security

We use reasonable technical measures to protect the limited information we handle, including serving the site over HTTPS. No method of transmitting data over the internet is completely secure, so we cannot guarantee absolute security.

8.International users

Our servers and service providers are located in the United States. If you use EvidenceSeek from outside the United States, including from the EU or UK, your information — such as your IP address and your query — is processed in the United States and in other countries where our providers operate.

9.Your choices and rights

Because we do not hold accounts or build a profile tied to you, in most cases there is no stored personal data for us to retrieve or delete on request. Depending on where you live (for example, the EU, UK, or California), you may have rights regarding the limited technical data we process; you can exercise them by contacting us. You can clear the data stored locally on your device at any time through your browser's settings.

10.Children

EvidenceSeek is a research tool intended for a general adult and academic audience. It is not directed to children, and we do not knowingly collect personal information from them.

11.Changes to this policy

We may update this policy from time to time. When we do, we will change the "Last updated" date above, and we will note significant changes on the site.

12.Contact

If you have questions or requests regarding this policy, contact us at privacy@evidenceseek.com.