Data retention and deletion

Summary#

One thing in Metric Vault deletes itself on a timer: saved tool results are removed 90 days after the run that produced them. Almost everything else stays until you delete it or until your account is closed. Closing an account is a request handled by our team, and the commitment is that personal information is deleted or anonymised within 90 days of closure, with billing records kept for up to 7 years for tax and accounting.

This page states which is which, so you can plan around it rather than discover it.

Purpose#

Retention matters in two directions and people usually only think about one.

The direction most policies cover is how long do you keep my data, which is a privacy and compliance question. The direction that actually costs people work is when will this disappear, which is an operational question. A client report you ran in March is not in the Library in July. Knowing that in advance means you export it; finding out afterwards means you pay credits to run it again.

Both answers are on this page, and neither is softened.

Overview#

Three regimes cover everything.

Automatic. Saved tool results have a fixed 90-day life. A background job removes anything older. Short-lived security artefacts — the temporary tokens that protect an integration connection, and the queue entries behind long-running AI jobs — are swept within minutes or hours of being created.

Yours to control. Monitored pages, rank alerts, schedules, share links, saved analyses, team memberships, connected integrations and branding all stay until you remove them. Nothing expires them for you.

Account closure. When an account is closed, personal information is deleted or anonymised within 90 days, billing records are retained for up to 7 years where law requires it, and anonymised aggregate data that cannot identify you may be kept indefinitely for product analytics.

How it works#

The 90-day purge of saved work#

Every run you save writes a result to the Library. A scheduled job deletes those results once they are more than 90 days old. It runs against everyone's Library on the same rule; there is no per-account setting, no extension, and no archive tier that keeps them longer.

What that means in practice:

• A result you ran on 1 March is gone from the Library in June.
• Deletion is permanent. There is no restore, and support cannot recover a purged result.
• The analysis itself is not lost forever — you can run the tool again — but it costs credits and the numbers will be current, not historical.
• If a result matters, export it. Every result carries Export PDF, Export Excel, Export CSV and Export JSON, and an exported file is yours with no retention clock on it. See Exporting your data and Exporting results.

Tracking history is a separate thing and is not covered by this purge. Rank alert history, position tracking history and AI visibility trend history accumulate for as long as the alert or the tracked brand exists, which is what makes the trend charts possible. Deleting the alert deletes its history with it.

Share links#

A share link is the one thing you can put an expiry on yourself. When you create one you choose whether it expires; if you do not set an expiry, the link never expires and stays public until you delete it.

Set an expiry on anything client-facing, and delete links you have finished with. See Sharing a result by link.

What deleting something in the app actually removes#

Deletion in Metric Vault cascades in the places where a child record would otherwise be orphaned. This table is the complete set.

All of these are permanent. There is no trash, no undo and no recovery window. Where a confirmation dialog exists, it is the only safety net.

What has no timer at all#

Being straight about this is more useful than implying a tidier system than we have. Apart from saved results, nothing else expires on its own. Your activity history, usage counters, monitored pages, alerts, schedules, branding, team records and integration connections persist for as long as the account exists.

That is a deliberate trade. Alerts that quietly stopped watching, or history that vanished mid-chart, would be worse than data that stays. But it does mean two things worth acting on:

• Review what is still running. A monitored page for a client you no longer have, or a rank alert on a domain you sold, keeps checking and keeps accumulating history. Deleting it is the only way to stop that.
• Nothing is minimised for you. If your own policy requires that data be removed after a period, you have to remove it, or ask us to. See Security best practices for your team.

Closing an account#

Deletion is deliberately not a button that wipes an account instantly. The Delete Account button in Account → Danger Zone confirms your intent with This permanently deletes your account and all data. Continue? and then opens a pre-written email to support@metricvaultai.com with the subject Account deletion request. A person carries the deletion out.

Two things to do before you send it:

1. Cancel your subscription. A deletion request does not stop billing. Use Account → Subscription → Manage Billing. See Cancelling your subscription.
2. Export what you want to keep. Everything goes. See Exporting your data.

Once the request is carried out:

Deleting your account is the step-by-step version of this. If you are in the EEA, the UK or Switzerland and want erasure under Article 17 rather than ordinary account closure, GDPR and compliance sets out that route and the response times.

Backups#

Automated backups of platform data are taken on a regular schedule and stored encrypted, separately from the primary data stores. A deletion is executed against live systems. If your own policy needs a statement about how long a deleted record may persist in a backup cycle, write to hello@metricvaultai.com and ask rather than assuming a figure.

Retention at a glance#