This index asks working marketers detailed questions about how they and their employers operate, and then publishes findings drawn from those answers. You are entitled to know exactly what is kept, what is published, and what control you have, before you answer the first question.
The Marketing AI Maturity Index is run by Brandon Sellers, an independent marketing consultant based in Oakland, California, and published alongside the newsletter Marketing in the Context Window. There is no company behind it, and no client sponsors it.
Questions, requests for a copy of your response, and deletion requests go to btsellers13@gmail.com.
The survey has forty questions. Most are multiple choice about how you work with AI. Two collect free text, and both are optional.
The application records the country your response came from, determined at the moment you submit. Your IP address is never stored. Only the country is kept.
The survey asks for your first name, your last name, and your email address before the first question, and all three are required to start. Your contact details are stored separately from your answers and linked only by a randomly generated response identifier. Your scorecard appears on screen the moment you finish.
If you choose to make a share card, you may write a short line about your work and add a photo. The photo never leaves your browser. It is drawn into the card image on your own device and is never uploaded to or stored on any server. The short line you write is stored only if you separately confirm that you want the card published.
Your answers produce your personal scorecard, feed the aggregate benchmarks, and inform the published report.
Your contact details are used for exactly three things. The first is sending you the full report when it publishes. The second is reaching you if you win the giveaway. The third is sending you your own survey results if you ask for them, which you can do for ninety days after you finish the survey. Nothing else is done with them. The survey offers no other choices today, and if one is ever added, such as a newsletter opt-in or permission to quote an open-text answer, it will be its own explicit choice rather than something bundled into taking the survey.
When you ask for your results later, they are emailed to the address you enter and are never shown on screen, so that nobody can look up another person's score.
The newsletter is a separate signup elsewhere on this site and is not connected to the survey. If you subscribe, every message includes a working unsubscribe link, and unsubscribing takes effect promptly. Subscribers are added to Substack by hand, so expect a delay of a few days.
The report and the public benchmark publish aggregate findings only. No individual response is ever published, and no breakdown is ever published that could isolate a single person. Three rules govern this, and they are set in advance rather than decided once the data is in.
Comparisons are always described as being among the people who took this survey, never as representing the industry as a whole. Early samples are labeled as what they are, a convenience sample of AI-forward marketers.
Your answers are kept indefinitely, without a name attached. The index measures how the field changes over time, and that requires keeping past quarters comparable.
The link between your email address and your answers is temporary. Once the things you asked for have happened, meaning the giveaway has been drawn and any newsletter signup has been processed, and in any case no later than ninety days after you respond, the response identifier is removed from your contact record. After that, your email address and your answers are permanently unlinkable.
That has a consequence worth stating plainly rather than burying. After the link is destroyed, a request to delete or retrieve your individual response cannot be honored, because there is no longer any way to tell which response is yours. If you want your response deleted or sent to you, make the request within ninety days.
Giveaway entry records are deleted ninety days after the draw, apart from the minimum record of the winner needed to deliver the prize and meet tax requirements. Newsletter subscriptions last until you unsubscribe.
While the link between your email and your response still exists, you can ask for a copy of your response, ask for it to be deleted, or withdraw a consent you previously gave. Requests are honored within thirty days.
You can unsubscribe from the newsletter at any time, and doing so does not remove your response from the benchmark, because those are separate things. Withdrawing quoting consent stops any future use, though a quote already published in a report that has gone out cannot be recalled from copies already distributed.
The index runs on third-party services, and each handles some of this data in order to do its job. Netlify hosts the site and runs the function that receives responses. Supabase stores responses and contact records. Substack delivers the newsletter and holds subscriber email addresses. Resend delivers the email carrying your results when you ask for them, receiving your email address, your first name, and your scores, and keeping the message it sent for thirty days under its own published retention policy.
Your data is not sold, is not shared with advertisers, is not shared with any consulting client, and is not used to build profiles of individuals.
This policy deliberately says pseudonymous rather than anonymous, because that is the accurate word.
Your response carries no name. But an optional company name and an optional free-text answer can, in combination, narrow down who someone is, and the random response identifier links your answers to your email address for as long as that link exists. Calling that anonymous would overstate the protection. Once the link is destroyed, and if you left the optional fields blank, your response is effectively anonymous. Until then it is pseudonymous.
Material changes are versioned here with a date, and the version in effect when you responded is the version that governs your data. Changes are not applied retroactively to data already collected under an earlier version.
Version 1.3, August 15, 2026. You can now ask to have your own survey results emailed to you for ninety days after you finish, so this policy names that as a third use of your email address alongside the report and the giveaway. Resend has been added to the list of services that touch the data, because it is the service that delivers that results email.
Version 1.2, August 9, 2026. The survey now asks for a first name, a last name, and an email address before it starts, so this policy states plainly that those details are collected from everyone and are used only to send the full report when it publishes and to reach the winner of the giveaway. Language describing an initial testing period has also been removed, because the index is now live as the finished product.
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