n-seo is a self-hosted tool. It runs on a machine you control, reads your Google data with credentials you control, and writes JSON files under data/. There is no hosted service, no telemetry, and no outbound traffic other than:

• the Google APIs you authorize (Search Console, GA4),
• plain HTTP fetches of your own sites (the probe and the metadata audit),
• the public Hacker News / Reddit / IndexNow APIs, only when you enable those modules,
• a local LLM command you configure, only when you enable that module.

Nothing posts, sends, or publishes on your behalf.

• The service-account key belongs outside the repo (default ~/.config/n-seo/service-account.json, chmod 600). .gitignore excludes *.key.json, service-account*.json, .env and your live config, but review git status before your first push anyway.
• Grant the service account the least access that works: Full on the Search Console property (needed for the URL Inspection API), Viewer on the GA4 property. It needs no IAM roles in the Google Cloud project.
• Reddit credentials live in .env; the dashboard never displays them.

• The dashboard binds 127.0.0.1 unless SEO_HOST says otherwise, and every POST (settings, backlog writes) must carry a same-origin Origin/Referer header or none at all. A web page you happen to visit cannot submit a form to http://localhost:4600/settings, and a machine on your LAN cannot reach it. Settings include the LLM command that ops/llm.py executes, so treat SEO_HOST=0.0.0.0 as opening that command to everyone who can reach the port.

• The dashboard binds every interface on its port (default 4600) and has no authentication of its own. Run it on a trusted machine or behind your own auth; do not expose the port to the internet. For access from another device use a tunnel (Tailscale, cloudflared).

• POST /mcp requires a bearer token (SEO_MCP_TOKEN in the environment or .env, or ~/.config/n-seo/mcp-token). With no token configured the endpoint returns 503 rather than serving. The comparison is constant-time. The stdio MCP transport needs no token: the OS process boundary is the authentication.

• The static export (site/) contains your search data and is written with noindex and a deny-all robots.txt; host it behind authentication.

Please use GitHub's private Security advisories for this repository ("Report a vulnerability") rather than a public issue. Include the version or commit, what you found, and how to reproduce it. You should hear back within a week.