Search boxes receive whatever people type into them — sometimes product names, sometimes personal information. Fetchie is built around that reality: the search log is useful because of what it deliberately leaves out. This page spells out exactly what’s stored, for how long, and what control you have.
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What the Search Log Stores
Each search a visitor runs adds one row to the log:
- The cleaned-up search words — lowercased, tidied, filler words removed. This normalised form is what the Insights reports group by
- How many results it found — this is what powers the “found nothing” content gap list
- Which match mode was active (Exact, Balanced or Broad)
- The date and time
That’s the complete list.
What It Never Stores
Nothing about the visitor. The log has no place to put a name, account, email address, network address, session, browser fingerprint or device detail — the columns simply don’t exist, which is a stronger promise than a setting that could be switched. Two searches for the same thing by two different people are indistinguishable in the log, and that’s the point: Insights tells you what your audience wants, never who wanted it.
A few related choices in the same spirit:
- Administrator searches are never logged at all — your own testing stays out of the data
- Searches that clean up to nothing (only filler words or single characters) aren’t recorded
- The results page itself doesn’t set cookies or track visitors
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Retention
Even an anonymous log shouldn’t live forever — visitors may type personal information into a search box, and a typed query is stored as typed words. So the log is retention-capped: choose 30, 90 or 365 days under Keep entries for on Tracksies > Fetchie > Insights, next to the log itself (90 is the default), and a daily cleanup deletes anything older.
We don’t know what your local laws and regulations require, but we hope to give you the tools to make it easier: no visitor identity is ever stored, and the words themselves expire on the schedule you set. Shorter is safer; longer gives Insights more history to work with. Your privacy policy — and whoever advises you on it — is the right place to settle where that balance sits for your business.
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The Search Index
The index itself (the content Fetchie searches) is built only from published, public content: drafts, private posts and password-protected content are never indexed, and anything unpublished or deleted leaves the index immediately. The index holds your site’s own public text — the same words any visitor could read on the page.
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Where the Data Lives
The search log and the index are stored in your own WordPress database, on your own server. Searching doesn’t send visitor queries to Fetchie, to Tracksies, or to any outside service.
Two admin-side connections do exist, and it’s fair you know about them: license activation contacts Appsero (the licensing service) to verify your key, and the optional usage telemetry — which asks for your consent with an admin notice and gathers nothing until you agree — shares basic environment information like WordPress and PHP versions. Neither involves your visitors or their searches.
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Uninstalling
Deactivating Fetchie never deletes anything. Uninstalling respects the On uninstall setting (Search settings): with “keep” on (the default), the index, log and settings survive for a possible reinstall; with it off, uninstalling removes every Fetchie table and option from your database.
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For Your Privacy Policy
Worth mentioning, in your own words:
- Site search queries are logged without any visitor identity, to improve site content
- Logged queries are deleted automatically after your chosen retention period
- Search data is stored on your own server and not shared with third parties
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Related
- Insights — what the log is for, and where retention is set
- Search settings — the uninstall toggle