Akismet Privacy

Your privacy is important to us

About Akismet

Akismet is the most powerful anti-spam service for the web. Akismet works by checking all your comments against our constantly-growing global spam database to remove irrelevant, malicious content before it gets published and damages your site’s credibility.

Akismet gets increasingly effective over time: the more it learns, the more it protects. Its algorithms are continuously learning from content marked as spam across websites, so it more accurately detects and removes spam from sites in the future.

When Akismet is enabled on your site, only the personal data needed to carry out Akismet’s core function of protecting your site against comment spam is collected from commenters on your site. We do not sell the data you send to the Akismet service, and we do not keep it for long. We have short retention periods of between two weeks and ninety days for the vast majority of our spam-related data, at which point it is automatically deleted from our databases. Anyone can opt-out of all long-term tracking for the very small subset of data we do keep longer by using our contact form. For more information, please visit the Automattic Privacy Notice.

Who we are and what we stand for

Akismet is brought to you by Automattic, the makers of WordPress.com, Jetpack, and WooCommerce. We’re a distributed company with 2,000 employees across 90 countries speaking 80 different languages. We believe in Open Source and the vast majority of our work is available under the GPL. Our common goal is to democratize publishing so that anyone with a story can tell it, regardless of income, gender, politics, language, or where they live in the world. You can read more about Automattic on our About Us page.

For more information

Automattic Privacy Policy

Automattic Privacy Notice

Akismet and the GDPR

Have a website that you’d like to defend against spam?

The gist

  • Akismet is committed to keeping your information private and secure.
  • Akismet’s goal is to protect your website from annoying or harmful spam comments.
  • As of 2023, Akismet has protected more than 100 million websites and has blocked over 540 billion spam comments.
  • We don’t collect more data than we need to in order to protect your site against spam.
  • The data we do collect is securely stored for short periods of time and then automatically deleted from our databases.
  • You can always opt-out of all long-term tracking at any time you wish.


We’ve decided to make these Terms available under a Creative Commons Sharealike license. You’re more than welcome to copy them, adapt them, and repurpose them for your own use. Just make sure to revise the language so that your Terms reflect your actual practices. Also, if you do use these Terms, we’d appreciate a credit and link to Akismet.com somewhere on your website.