What data Ariadne sends outside your site, and under exactly what conditions.
The short version
Ariadne’s own matching — tag overlap, category overlap, and title similarity — runs entirely on your own server. No external service, no account, and no API key are needed to get a genuinely good related-posts engine. One piece (Freemius, for licensing) is active on every install; two more only ever load under the specific, tier-gated conditions below.
Freemius (licensing)
Ariadne uses the Freemius SDK to manage plugin updates and Pro/Pro+ license activation. It contacts the Freemius API (api.freemius.com) to check your license status and deliver updates. On activation, Freemius shows its own opt-in screen asking permission before any anonymous, non-personal diagnostic data (e.g. site URL, plugin/WordPress/PHP versions) is shared — declining it doesn’t affect the plugin’s functionality.
Google Fonts Pro / Pro+
Ariadne’s own Dashboard, Settings, and Post Status admin screens use your computer’s system font (since 1.9.63) — no font is downloaded, and nothing is requested from Google for those screens.
Separately, if you’re on a Pro or Pro+ plan and choose one of the curated Google Fonts for your Related Posts card styling in the Customizer, that one font family is requested from Google’s font CDN on your site’s frontend. Only the standard browser request information (like IP address and user agent) reaches Google — nothing else.
Voyage AI Pro / Pro+
If you’re on a Pro or Pro+ plan and have entered your own Voyage AI API key, Ariadne sends each post’s title and body text to the Voyage AI API once — when that post is saved, and only if its content has actually changed — to compute the semantic-matching signal. This is entirely opt-in: no key means no calls. It also uses your own Voyage AI account and key, never one shared by or routed through Ariadne or Uwawp.
What never leaves your site
Tag overlap, category overlap, title similarity, and local text (BM25) scoring are all computed directly on your own server, with no account and no API key required for any of it. This is the complete Free plan — a fully-functioning related-posts engine entirely on its own.