Search logs are unusually sensitive data, and it is easy to miss why until you look at a real one.
People search for things they would not click on in public. Health questions. Money questions. Products they are embarrassed about. Whether you have a returns policy, twenty minutes before they ask for a refund.
Attach a name or an account to those queries and you have built something you now have to protect, justify and eventually explain. Fetchie is built so that never happens.
What is stored
The query, and the fact it ran. That is the whole record.
No user ID, so a logged-in customer’s searches are not linked to their account. No IP address. No session identifier, no browser fingerprint, no cookie.
There is no way to reconstruct who searched for what, because the connection is never written down in the first place. The insights are aggregate by construction, not by a setting someone could switch off later.
Or don’t record at all
Recording is a toggle, under Settings, Features. Turn it off and Fetchie stops writing searches down — the search box works exactly as before, you simply have no log and no Insights tab worth opening.
It is on by default, because the insights are the reason most people want it and a feature nobody knows to switch on is a feature nobody has. But some sites should not keep this data, and the honest way to support that is a switch that genuinely stops the writing rather than a setting that hides the report.
Turning it off does not orphan what you already have. The daily clean-up keeps running, so existing entries still age out under your retention window instead of sitting there forever.
Retention
On Fetchie’s Insights tab, next to the log itself: choose 30, 90 or 365 days. Anything older is cleared automatically, and the default is 90.
The choice is yours because the right answer depends on your site and your jurisdiction, and we do not know what your local laws and regulations require. What we can do is give you the control and make the default a sensible one rather than "keep everything forever".
Shorter windows suit sites where search volume is high and the recent picture is what matters. Longer windows suit seasonal businesses, where comparing this March to last March is the useful comparison.
Stays on your server
The log is a table in your own database. No external service, no analytics vendor, no data leaving your hosting. Fetchie makes no outbound request to report on searches, because the searches were already happening on your site.
That also means it keeps working when someone visits with an ad blocker or tracking protection on, which is a growing share of traffic and a growing hole in script-based analytics.
Seeing the log
The Insights tab shows the raw log as well as the summaries: each search, when it ran, and how many results it found.
That is there for the same reason the retention setting is. If we are asking you to make a decision about how long to keep this data, you are entitled to see exactly what it is you are keeping, rather than taking our word for what is in it.
On uninstall
If you remove Fetchie, the search data goes with it by default. There is a setting to preserve it instead, for the case where you are reinstalling or moving hosts and would rather not lose your history.
The default is removal, because a plugin that leaves data behind after you have uninstalled it is a plugin that made a decision it was not entitled to make.