Privacy Policy

Last updated: August 26, 2026

The short version

SoilLookup.com has no accounts, no logins, and no sign-up forms, and we set no cookies of our own. We do not save the addresses you look up. There is one thing we do record in a database — clicks on our Amazon links — and it has its own section below, named field by field. The site also uses Google Analytics, shows advertising, and loads maps and address suggestions from other companies’ servers. Two details are worth reading properly: the address you search appears in the page URL, and affiliate clicks are logged with your IP address.

The address you search is in the page URL

When you look up a property, the results page has an address like /lookup?q=123+Main+St,+Denver,+CO. Your search sits in the URL rather than being posted invisibly, which is what lets you bookmark a soil report, refresh it, or send it to a builder or an agent.

It also means your search travels with every request for that page, so it is visible to our server and its logs, to Cloudflare in front of us, to Google Analytics (which records the full page address), to advertising partners (which receive the address of the page an ad appeared on), and to your own browser history and anyone you send the link to.

We do not write your searches to a database, associate them with you, or build a profile from them. But “not stored by us” is not the same as “not seen by anyone,” and stating only the first half would be misleading. If you would rather a specific street address not be recorded anywhere, search by ZIP code or by county instead — county pages cover the same survey data.

Address suggestions, geocoding, and “use my location”

Three separate paths, and they behave differently:

• While you type, suggestions come from Esri’s ArcGIS service, requested by your browser directly. Esri receives your IP address and whatever you have typed so far. This happens before you submit anything.
• When you submit, the address is turned into coordinates by ArcGIS or by OpenStreetMap’s Nominatim, requested by our server. On this path neither service sees your IP address, because the request comes from us. The coordinates then go to the USDA’s Soil Data Access service, also from our server, to fetch the soil record.
• If you press the location button, your browser asks your permission and hands us your coordinates, which are placed into the page URL. We do not request continuous or background location and we do not store the result.

See Esri’s privacy policy and the OpenStreetMap Foundation privacy policy.

Affiliate links — the one thing we record

Some product links on this site are Amazon affiliate links. As an Amazon Associate we earn from qualifying purchases, at no extra cost to you. Those links are marked where they appear, and no product recommendation is paid placement — recommendations follow from the soil data.

Affiliate links route through /r/out on our own server before redirecting you to Amazon, so that we can count clicks. When you click one, we write a row containing:

• the time of the click,
• which link it was, and the search term it was built from (for example a plant or amendment name),
• your IP address,
• your browser’s user-agent string, and
• the page you clicked from.

That is the complete list, and that table is the only database on this site that contains anything about a visitor. It is used to tell which recommendations are useful; it is never sold, shared, or joined to anything else, and we make no attempt to identify anyone from it. Requests that look like bots are not recorded at all. We do not currently expire these rows on a schedule — if you want yours removed, write to us with the approximate time and we will delete them.

Once you arrive at Amazon you are on Amazon’s site under Amazon’s privacy notice, and Amazon sets its own cookies.

Analytics

We use Google Analytics 4 to see which pages get visited and how people move through the site. It uses cookies and reports to us only in aggregate — we cannot see individual visitors. As noted above, the page addresses it records include search text. You can opt out with the Google Analytics Opt-out Browser Add-on.

Advertising

Display advertising on this site is served through Mediavine Journey. Journey and its advertising partners may use cookies, device identifiers and similar technologies to select and measure ads, including ads based on your activity on other sites. What they typically receive includes your IP address, browser and device type, the pages you viewed and the time of your visit.

You can limit or opt out of personalised advertising here:

• Digital Advertising Alliance opt-out (US)
• Your Online Choices (EU/UK)
• Network Advertising Initiative opt-out
• Google Ads Settings

Mediavine’s own disclosures are at mediavine.com/privacy-policy. If you are in a region with consent requirements, a consent prompt is presented before personalised ads are served, and you can change your choice at any time through that prompt.

If you are seeing our lookup on someone else’s website

We publish a small embeddable version of the soil lookup that other websites can place on their own pages. If you used it somewhere other than here, the address you typed was sent to our server to fetch the soil record, exactly as it would have been on this site. We do not set cookies through the embed, we do not record the lookup, and we receive nothing else about you from the site hosting it.

Other companies whose servers your browser contacts

• OpenStreetMap — the base map tiles on our maps.
• unpkg — the Leaflet mapping library.
• Esri — address suggestions while you type, as above.
• Google — analytics, as above.
• Mediavine Journey and its advertising partners — ads, as above.
• Amazon — only if you click an affiliate link.

Nominatim and the USDA’s Soil Data Access are contacted by our server rather than your browser, so neither sees your IP address.

Server logs

Our web server and Cloudflare record ordinary access information — IP address, browser type, addresses requested, timestamps — for security and debugging. These are not sold or shared.

What we do not do

We do not require or accept accounts. We set no cookies of our own. We have no contact forms, mailing list, or newsletter, and we do not collect email addresses. We do not save your soil lookups. We do not sell personal information. Product recommendations are not paid placements.

Your rights

If you are a California resident, the CCPA/CPRA gives you the right to know what personal information is collected about you and to opt out of its sale or sharing. We do not sell personal information; to opt out of personalised advertising specifically, use the links above.

If you are in the European Economic Area, the United Kingdom, or another jurisdiction with comparable law, you have rights of access, correction, deletion and restriction under the GDPR or its local equivalent. The only record we hold that could relate to you is an affiliate-click row as described above — write to p@pwhite.org with the approximate date and time and we will find and delete it.

Children

This site is not directed at children under 13 and we do not knowingly collect personal information from them.

About the soil data

Soil data comes from the USDA Natural Resources Conservation Service’s SSURGO database, retrieved through its Soil Data Access service. This is public-record federal survey data about land, not about people. SoilLookup.com is an independent project and is not affiliated with the USDA, the NRCS, or any government agency.

Security and changes

The site is served over HTTPS. No website can promise absolute security, but we take reasonable measures. If this policy changes materially, the “last updated” date above will change.

Contact

Privacy questions: p@pwhite.org