Capconvert
Capconvert pairs a San Francisco search marketing agency with Cortex, an AI decision engine that monitors SEO, GEO, CRO and PPC signals for e-commerce brands, SaaS companies and multi-site agencies, with human experts validating high-stakes changes.
What is Capconvert?
Capconvert, LLC. is a search marketing agency founded and based in San Francisco, California, and Cortex is the AI product it sells alongside its services. The company describes Cortex as a search marketing intelligence and decision engine: software that reads signals, weighs them against primary documentation and says what to change, rather than a dashboard that hands over metrics and leaves the interpretation to the user. Capconvert positions it explicitly against data tools such as Ahrefs, Semrush and Optmyzr.
Cortex works across four disciplines, SEO, GEO, CRO and PPC, on ten platforms: Google Ads, Amazon Ads, Bing Ads, Meta Ads, TikTok Ads, ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Claude and Klaviyo. Its monitoring layer is a set of 36 Sentries, always-on auditors with one Sentry per ranking or performance signal and a published rule count for each, such as 12 rules for Googlebot, 11 for LCP and 13 for Google Ads. A sweep runs daily at 03:30 ET, with results delivered by email and Slack.
Recommendations are drawn from a corpus the vendor sizes at 172,397 documents and 1.73 million passages from 81 sources, queried through hybrid BM25 and vector search with reciprocal rank fusion and a Cohere rerank-v3.5 pass, at a claimed sub-100 ms latency. Every recommendation follows the A.R.I. protocol, Action, Reason and Impact, and cites its source URLs under a stated no source, no claim rule. Claude Opus 4.7 handles the primary reasoning, with OpenAI models on secondary tasks.
Two tiers exist. Copilot observes and recommends; Autopilot adds Optimizers that apply fixes to the live site. Capconvert states that its own experts sign off on every high-stakes change, a stance it sums up as AI-run, expert-managed. Setup is an OAuth wizard connecting GA4, Search Console, Google Ads and Shopify.
The agency side sells five service programmes, AEO, SEO, GEO, PPC and Website, billed as month-to-month retainers quoted case by case, with a dedicated Slack channel and fortnightly Zoom reviews. Its headline figures of 300+ clients, 500 million USD in attributed revenue, 90,000 delivery hours and 20+ countries served are self-reported.
What it does
- Monitor visibility signals around the clock through 36 Sentries covering Core Web Vitals, structured data, robots and llms.txt files and ad account health
- Produce source-cited recommendations from a corpus of primary documentation, each one following the Action / Reason / Impact protocol
- Execute fixes directly on the live site through the Optimizers of the Autopilot tier
- Audit how the brand is cited by ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Claude and AI Overviews
- Audit and optimise Google, Meta, Microsoft, Amazon and TikTok Ads accounts
- Run a daily audit sweep at 03:30 ET and push alerts by email and Slack
- Answer questions in chat about any monitored signal or page
When to use Capconvert / When not to
A quick filter to help you decide if Capconvert is the right fit.
When to use Capconvert
- DTC and e-commerce brands on Shopify, BigCommerce or Magento that need product schema, Merchant Center feeds and conversion signals watched continuously
- Search marketing agencies running ten sites or more, who need sub-accounts, client logins and white-label reporting
- In-house marketing teams with no dedicated SEO or GEO specialist on staff
- PPC managers handling Google, Meta, Amazon, Microsoft and TikTok Ads accounts from a single console
- Brands that want to be cited by ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Claude, and need their generative visibility audited
When not to use Capconvert
- Private individuals and anyone under 18: the Cortex terms restrict the service to business use by adults
- Teams whose priority channels sit outside SEO, GEO, CRO and PPC, the only four disciplines Cortex covers
- Non-English-speaking teams: the interface, the support and the documentation are English only
- Buyers who need a permanently free tool, since the cheapest tier starts at 39 USD per site per month
- Resellers hoping to repackage raw Cortex output as a standalone product, which the terms explicitly prohibit
How to use Capconvert
A typical end-to-end flow, from setup to results.
- Open the Cortex activation page and start the setup wizard
- Connect Google Analytics 4 and Google Search Console, the minimum needed for organic coverage
- Add Google Ads to bring paid search into scope
- Connect Shopify, or BigCommerce, Magento or Webflow through their APIs, to switch on the e-commerce Sentries
- Approve each integration through OAuth, selecting which accounts Cortex may read
- Allow 10 to 20 minutes for the wizard, most of it spent approving OAuth scopes
- Expect first insights within a few hours; historical backfill, such as 37 months of Google Ads through BigQuery Data Transfer, arrives over the following weeks
- Add Meta Ads, Bing Ads, TikTok Ads and Klaviyo later from the dashboard
- Review the Sentry verdicts, chat with Cortex and arbitrate the A.R.I. recommendations
- Move to Autopilot to let the Optimizers execute; disconnect at any time from Settings > Connected Accounts, which purges the data immediately
Pros & Cons
Pros
- Every recommendation cites verifiable primary sources, under an explicit no source, no claim rule
- Four disciplines and ten platforms covered by a single system, where several specialist agencies would otherwise be needed
- Low entry price for the category at 39 USD per site per month, or 99 USD with automated execution
- Marginal volume discounts of 20% from ten sites, 35% from fifty and 50% from a hundred, plus 20% off annual billing
- A seven-day Autopilot trial and month-to-month billing, with cancellation possible at any time and no minimum term
- An explicit commitment that customer data is never used to train AI models, at Capconvert or at Anthropic, OpenAI and Google
- Unusually complete public compliance documentation: DPA, subprocessor list, retention policy, vulnerability disclosure and AI bot policy
Cons
- No permanently free plan, and a payment card is required from the seven-day trial onwards
- Billing is per site and, under Autopilot, per execution credit, which makes the monthly cost hard to forecast
- Overage credits cost 4 USD each while the number of credits each Optimizer consumes is not published
- No published security certification, neither SOC 2 nor ISO 27001, and no public bug bounty programme
- Data is hosted in the United States only, on AWS US-East-2 and US-West-2, with no EU residency option
- No public API documentation, even though API access is advertised on both tiers, and no mobile app has been published
- Interface and support are English only, and the headline performance figures are self-reported and unverifiable
Pricing & Plans
There is no permanently free plan. The lowest paid entry point is the Cortex Copilot tier at 39.00 USD per site per month; the Autopilot tier, which adds automated execution, costs 99.00 USD per site per month and includes 50 credits per site. A seven-day Autopilot trial on one site is offered, with a payment card required and first billing on the eighth day. Annual payment carries a 20% discount. Agency services are quoted and billed separately.
- unlimited access to the 36 Sentries
- daily 03:30 ET sweep
- source-cited recommendations
- chat
- email and Slack alerts
- OAuth SSO
- API access
- email support and agency features from ten sites
- everything in Copilot plus Optimizers that execute changes
- 50 credits per site per month
- overage at 4 USD per credit
- a default hard cap at twice the included credits
- a review-required mode
- credit refunds when the failure is on the Cortex side
- and priority support
- 1 to 9 sites at full price
- 10 to 49 sites at 20% off
- 50 to 99 sites at 35% off
- 100 sites and above at 50% off
- 20% discount on either tier
- ten sites on Copilot at 382 USD per month
- an effective 38 USD per site
- or 3
- 669 USD per year
- ten sites on Autopilot at 970 USD per month
- an effective 97 USD per site with 500 credits
- or 9
- 314 USD per year
- seven days of Autopilot on one site
- with 50 credits included
- monthly retainers quoted case by case
- with no public rate card
- the Website Program sits outside the retainer model
Data, GDPR & hosting
A consolidated view of how Capconvert handles your data.
GDPR overview
GDPR implementation is documented, not merely claimed. A Cortex Data Processing Addendum is published as a downloadable PDF covering EU GDPR, UK GDPR and CCPA/CPRA, with Standard Contractual Clauses (Module Two, controller-to-processor) plus a UK Addendum and a Swiss equivalent. The privacy policy, effective 7 April 2026, lists the data subject rights available (access, rectification, erasure, restriction, portability, objection, withdrawal of consent) and the legal bases relied on: consent for newsletters and marketing cookies, legitimate interest for analytics, and contractual necessity. Rights requests go to hello@capconvert.com and deletion requests to privacy@capconvert.com, acknowledged within 72 hours and processed within 30 days, or 45 days for CCPA requests. A public subprocessor list is maintained with 15 days' notice before any addition, and a cookie consent banner is announced for EU visitors. No Article 27 EU representative is designated.
Who owns the data?
Under the Cortex terms, Customer Data covers everything you submit or authorise Cortex to pull from Search Console, GA4, Ahrefs, your ad accounts and your own site, and it stays yours: you retain all right, title and interest in Customer Data. Capconvert takes only a worldwide, non-exclusive licence to host, process, transmit and display it for the purpose of running the service, and states that it does not sell Customer Data. The Cortex Outputs themselves, meaning recommendations, audits, briefs, schema and exports, remain Capconvert property and are licensed back to you on a limited, non-exclusive, non-transferable, non-sublicensable and revocable basis. For GDPR purposes Capconvert acts as processor and the customer as controller.
Reuse rights
Customers may use Cortex outputs in their own marketing operations without asking permission. Agencies may fold them into deliverables for bona fide clients during an active engagement, and derivative work such as edited articles, schema blocks and FAQ pages may be published. What is forbidden is reselling or relicensing raw outputs as a standalone product, using them as AI training data, including them in third-party datasets, or presenting an output as the work of a system other than Cortex. The detailed conditions live on Capconvert's output usage rights page. Separately, agency deliverables such as ad copy, SEO recommendations and campaign structures become the client's property once the engagement is paid in full.
Data retention & training
Hosting summary
Cortex data sits in dedicated Neon Postgres databases, encrypted at rest and hosted on AWS in the US-East-2 and US-West-2 regions. Each Cortex product has its own scoped database, so cortex-meta is isolated from cortex-google-ads, cortex-corpus and the others. Traffic is encrypted in transit with TLS 1.2 or above. The application layer runs on Vercel, with Cloudflare providing CDN, DNS and bot management at the edge. The infrastructure subprocessors named are Vercel Inc. (US), Neon Inc. (US), AWS (US) and Cloudflare (worldwide). Transfers from the EEA, the United Kingdom and Switzerland to the United States are covered by Standard Contractual Clauses together with the UK IDTA. The contract is governed by California law, with venue in the courts of San Francisco County. No EU hosting option is mentioned anywhere on the site, so European customers should assume storage in the United States.
Things to keep in mind
Risks and trade-offs to weigh before adopting Capconvert.
- Under Autopilot, the Optimizers change the live site: unwanted edits are possible if the review-required mode is not switched on
- Delegating judgement is a real risk, since the terms state that outputs are decision support, are not guaranteed accurate, complete or current, and must be reviewed before publication
- Internal skills can erode if the team stops understanding SEO and GEO fundamentals and simply applies what the engine says
- Costs are variable: overage credits at 4 USD each, a hard cap that can be disabled, and billing in arrears
- OAuth read access to GA4, Search Console, Google Ads, Shopify and Meta widens the exposure surface of the marketing stack
- Data is hosted in the United States, with EU, UK and Swiss transfers relying on Standard Contractual Clauses
- Depending on one vendor for four disciplines makes leaving expensive, and data is retained only 90 days after termination
Setup & Integrations
Technical difficulty
Low. Setup is an activation wizard of 10 to 20 minutes, most of it spent approving OAuth scopes; there is no software to install and no code to add to the site. A working minimum is Google Analytics 4 plus Search Console. The only real prerequisite is holding admin rights on the marketing accounts to be connected. On the Autopilot tier, execution also assumes write access to the site, since a block on the customer side still consumes the credit. Historical backfill is automatic but spreads over several weeks.
Deployment
Integrations
Supported languages
Behind Capconvert
Social
Resources
All the official URLs gathered for verification and reference.
Alternatives
Tools that compete with or complement Capconvert.
Frequently asked questions
What exactly is Cortex?
How much does Cortex cost?
Is there a free trial?
Is my data used to train AI models?
Where is my data hosted?
Which integrations do I need to get started?
How long does onboarding take?
Which AI models does Cortex rely on?
Is Cortex GDPR and CCPA compliant?
How do I delete my data?
Should you pick Capconvert?
Capconvert is an unusual hybrid: a San Francisco search marketing agency that also sells the AI engine behind its own delivery. That shapes what Cortex is good at. Its strongest trait is traceability, since every recommendation follows the Action / Reason / Impact protocol and cites the primary documentation it came from, under a stated no source, no claim rule, with human sign-off on high-stakes changes. For a team that has been burned by confident but unsourced AI advice, that is the difference that matters.
The compliance posture is equally unusual for a company of this size: a published DPA covering EU and UK GDPR as well as CCPA/CPRA, Standard Contractual Clauses, a public subprocessor list with 15 days' notice, a documented retention schedule and a vulnerability disclosure policy. The vendor also states plainly that customer data is never used to train models, at Capconvert or at its own AI suppliers.
The weaknesses are real too. The performance claims that anchor the marketing, 500 million USD in attributed revenue, four-figure ROAS and 300+ clients, are self-reported and cannot be checked. No independent security certification is published despite the depth of the compliance material. The Autopilot credit model makes the monthly bill hard to forecast, data is hosted in the United States only, and everything is in English.
In practice, Cortex suits e-commerce brands, SaaS companies and multi-site agencies that already run several search and paid channels and want one system watching them. It is a poor fit for personal use, for teams whose priorities sit outside SEO, GEO, CRO and PPC, and for anyone who needs a certified vendor or European data residency before signing.
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