Terms of Service & Privacy Policy

Last updated: 21 March 2026

Academic SEO provides pre-publication manuscript optimisation services for researchers in the biological sciences and medicine. These terms govern your use of our service and explain how we handle your data.

1. Manuscript Confidentiality

When you share a manuscript with us, we treat it as strictly confidential material. Specifically:

• Access: Only team members directly assigned to your project will access your manuscript. We do not use subcontractors or outsource any part of the work without your written consent.
• Transfer: Manuscripts must be shared via encrypted file transfer (e.g. password-protected cloud storage link). We do not accept manuscripts via unencrypted email and will redirect you to a secure channel if you attempt to do so.
• Storage: During the project, your manuscript is stored in access-controlled, encrypted cloud storage. Access is restricted to assigned team members only.
• Deletion: All copies of your manuscript, including any working drafts, notes, and derivative files, are permanently deleted within 30 days of delivering the final optimisation report. You may request earlier deletion at any time.
• No secondary use: Your manuscript will never be used for marketing, case studies, benchmarking, internal training, or any purpose other than delivering the agreed service, unless you give explicit written consent.

2. AI Tools & Third-Party Services

Our analysis may involve the use of AI-assisted tools for readability scoring, keyword analysis, and search pattern research. Where we use such tools:

• We disclose which tools are used in your project upon request.
• We only use tools with verified data handling policies that do not retain, store, or use input data for model training.
• We never upload your full manuscript to any third-party AI platform. Where AI tools are used, only de-identified excerpts (e.g. individual sentences for readability analysis) are processed.
• If our tooling changes, we will update this policy accordingly.

3. Non-Disclosure Agreement

We provide a mutual NDA on request, at no additional cost, before you share any material. If your institution requires the use of their own NDA template, we are happy to review and sign it. NDAs are standard practice for our service, not a special accommodation.

4. What We Deliver

Our service produces an optimisation report containing recommendations for your manuscript. This includes, but is not limited to: title and abstract rewrite suggestions, keyword analysis, readability assessment, figure caption recommendations, metadata guidance, lay summary drafts, and AI search visibility assessment.

All recommendations are advisory. You retain full control over your manuscript and decide which suggestions to incorporate. We do not submit, publish, or modify your manuscript directly.

5. Intellectual Property

You retain all intellectual property rights to your manuscript at all times. The optimisation report we deliver becomes your property upon payment. We claim no ownership, licence, or rights over your manuscript or its contents.

6. Payment & Refunds

Payment is due upon confirmation of your order, before work begins. If we are unable to deliver the agreed service, you will receive a full refund. If you are unsatisfied with the quality of the report, contact us within 14 days of delivery and we will either revise the report or issue a partial refund at our discretion.

7. Privacy & Personal Data

We collect only the personal data necessary to deliver our service: your name, email address, institutional affiliation, and any details you provide in the submission form. We use this data solely to communicate with you about your project.

• We do not sell, share, or transfer your personal data to third parties for marketing purposes.
• We store your contact details in encrypted systems and retain them only as long as necessary for our business relationship.
• You may request deletion of your personal data at any time by emailing gkumar@academicseo.co.uk.
• If you are based in the UK or EU, you have rights under UK GDPR / EU GDPR including the right to access, rectify, and erase your personal data. Contact us to exercise these rights.

8. Cookies & Analytics

We use one analytics tool: Google Analytics 4 (GA4). We use it to see which articles readers find useful so we can write more of those and fewer of the unread ones. We do not use GA4 for advertising, remarketing, or any form of cross-site tracking.

We do not load GA4 until you explicitly agree. The first time you visit any page on this site, a banner appears at the bottom of the screen with two equally-weighted buttons: "Accept analytics" and "Reject". Until you click Accept, no cookies are set and no data is sent to Google. This is stricter than Google's own Consent Mode v2, which still sends cookieless pings to Google by default, we do not do that. Nothing leaves your browser for Google until you opt in.

If you click Accept, GA4 loads and sets the following cookies:

• _ga, first-party cookie, 2-year lifetime, stores a randomly-generated client ID. Used by GA4 to distinguish returning visitors from new ones.
• _ga_DZ5J9Q3BZE, first-party cookie, 2-year lifetime, stores session state for this specific GA4 property.

When GA4 is active, it sends the following data to Google on each page view: the URL you visited, the referrer that brought you here, your device type and screen size, your approximate country (derived from IP then discarded, GA4 does not offer IP anonymisation as a toggle the way Universal Analytics did, but Google's current documented behaviour for EU/UK traffic is to process IP at the edge and not store it long-term). If you submit the audit-request form, GA4 also receives a "generate_lead" conversion event with no personal data attached.

We record your choice (accept or reject) in your browser's localStorage under the key academicseo_consent. That record is stored only on your device, we do not send it to our server or to any third party. It contains your choice, the timestamp, and a version number so we can re-ask if we ever add a new tracker.

Changing your mind. You can withdraw or re-grant consent at any time by clicking "Cookie preferences" in the footer of any page. That clears the stored choice and shows the banner again. You can also clear the academicseo_consent key from your browser's developer tools, or clear site data entirely via your browser settings.

There are no other cookies. No advertising pixels, no session replay, no fingerprinting, no social-media trackers, no A/B-testing tools. If you reject analytics, this site sets zero cookies.

9. Limitation of Liability

Our service provides advisory recommendations for manuscript discoverability. We do not guarantee specific search engine rankings, citation counts, or publication outcomes. Search engine algorithms and AI platform behaviours are outside our control and change over time.

Our total liability for any claim arising from the service is limited to the fee paid for that specific engagement.

10. Changes to These Terms

We may update these terms from time to time. Material changes will be communicated to active clients by email. The "last updated" date at the top of this page reflects the most recent revision.

11. Contact

For questions about these terms, your data, or our confidentiality practices:

Email: gkumar@academicseo.co.uk