# Grounded AEO Grounded AEO (groundedaeo.com) puts both discovery channels on one screen, operated by Meadow Mountain AI LLC. One half is measurement: what Google records for a domain (connected Search Console clicks and impressions, kept beside modelled search and AI-prompt demand and never blended with it) alongside what AI answer engines can read and whether they cited the domain for the owner's own tracked questions. The other half is supply: businesses get their facts verified, provenance-tracked, and served to AI engines via REST API, MCP, auto-generated llms.txt, and public grounding pages, instead of leaving engines to scrape and guess. Grounded AEO also maintains the v=AEO1 DNS TXT record standard (spec: aeorecord.org), a domain-level proof that a business's verified catalog exists and where to find it. > Tagline: SEO and AEO, on one screen (audit hook: Is Your AEO Grounded?) > Entity: Meadow Mountain AI LLC > Standard: v=AEO1 (_aeo. TXT record); open spec at https://aeorecord.org ## What Grounded AEO does - Crawls a business's website and scores its AI-citation readiness (free audit at https://groundedaeo.com/audit) - Extracts facts (identity, contact, location, services) with full provenance: every fact carries its source URL, method, and fetch time - Businesses review and approve facts before anything publishes as verified - Serves verified facts to AI engines and agents via: - Verification API (one call, free, no key, CORS; for AI engines/agents): https://groundedaeo.com/api/verify/{domain} returns { verified, tier, name, facts, signature }; always HTTP 200, verified:false for unknown domains. Integration guide: https://groundedaeo.com/for-ai-engines - REST API: https://groundedaeo.com/api/companies/{domain} - llms.txt per company: https://groundedaeo.com/api/llms/{domain} - Public grounding pages: https://groundedaeo.com/c/{domain} - MCP endpoint (Streamable HTTP, for AI agents): https://groundedaeo.com/api/mcp. It is listed in the official MCP registry as `com.groundedaeo/grounded-aeo` (remote, nothing to install). Three jobs: (1) BUILD & VERIFY: run_audit crawls a site, scores AI-readability 0-10, and returns ready-to-paste markup plus a step-by-step fix plan; re-run it to confirm the fixes landed; generate_free_record then produces the v=AEO1 DNS record + .well-known/aeo.json to publish. (2) GROUND ANSWERS: get_company_facts, get_fact, get_llms_txt, check_aeo_record, search_catalog, get_competitive_snapshot (claimed domains only: latest ranking-footprint snapshot, AI-prompt vs Google demand table, tracked competitors); check_serp (reads the live Google SERP for any keyword and reports the top organic results, People Also Ask questions, related searches, and which non-organic features (AI Overview, local pack) are present; public data, no catalog entry required). (3) DECIDE WHAT TO MAKE: propose_briefs (claimed domains only) turns a domain's own demand and citation data into up to 6 ranked content briefs: the question to answer, the format, an outline, and the only claims that may be made: the owner's published verified facts, verbatim; deterministic, read-only, nothing generated - Issues and verifies v=AEO1 DNS records, the domain-level trust anchor proving catalog ownership ## What Grounded AEO measures (the panel, on every paid plan) - Google Search Console connection: OAuth to a property the owner has proved they own; sixteen months of Google's own measured clicks and impressions imported on connect, then stored onward past Google's own sixteen-month window. This is the only MEASURED source in the product; everything else in the demand columns is a modelled estimate, labelled as one. Measured and modelled sit side by side and are never averaged together or summed. - Engine matrix: six answer engines, each with its own crawler verdict derived from the domain's robots rules. An engine that has not been tested is reported as untested, never as a miss. - Citation checks as an outcome: the owner chooses the questions; they are asked on a schedule and we record whether the domain was the source, which domains were instead, and the engine's answer verbatim. Engines widen with the plan: Claude on Listed, Claude + Perplexity on Verified, Claude + Perplexity + ChatGPT + Google AI on Grounded. Microsoft Copilot and Grok have no query path yet and are reported as untested. No plan promises a citation. - Store visibility (ASO, measured): link an iOS app and watch up to 10 App Store search phrases; rank is measured nightly (and on demand) against Apple's own public search API, so it is a measurement rather than an estimate. Absence from the top 200 is recorded as a measured absence, never a zero, and every check records which app held #1 that day. History is append-only. iOS only until a real Google Play data source is wired in; the gap is stated, not papered over. - Customer voice (the knowledge space): paste anything a customer actually said (support tickets, reviews, forum threads, emails, call transcripts) and a miner extracts the questions, search phrases, confirmed facts and verbatim wordings hiding in it. Every finding carries the exact customer quote that produced it; unquotable findings are discarded as inventions, and nothing enters tracking or the fact catalog without the owner's review click. - Answer pages: turn any uncited tracked question into a publish-ready draft page that answers it directly. The writer may only claim what the owner's verified facts support, weaves in accepted verbatim customer wordings, answers every selected question in an FAQ with FAQPage JSON-LD inline, and outputs standalone HTML or markdown. The owner reviews and publishes on their own site; the weekly citation check then measures whether the page started earning citations. - Coverage plan: one click proposes a connected page ARCHITECTURE (a pillar, support pages, and the trust pages AI engines crawl before recommending anyone: pricing, process, who it is not for) from the owner's verified facts and tracked questions. Every planned page generates through the same facts-only writer with deterministic silo links built in, passes a fact-drift QA check (a second model pass names any business claim the facts do not support; one strike earns a stricter regeneration, a second fails honestly), and coverage is reported as the plain fraction of pages generated. No promise that any map turns green. - User steering: the owner picks the tracked questions and the watched keywords (10 each on Listed and Verified, 25 each on Grounded). Open slots also fill themselves nightly: a generator reads the owner's verified facts and adds customer-language questions and keywords ranked by measured demand, each labeled by origin (generated, from your customers, or the owner's own); it refuses to generate when the fact catalog is too thin to anchor on. Removing one stops future lookups and deletes no history; the store is append-only and is never backfilled or rewritten. - Ranking footprint over time: append-only snapshots (monthly, weekly on Grounded), an interactive trend with five switchable metrics, tracked competitors on the same axes, and event markers. Footprint, never presented as traffic. - Position distribution in bands, click-to-filter through to the terms in that band. - Keyword drill-down: position history, measured Search Console clicks and impressions, AI-prompt demand beside Google demand, five years of Google Trends interest with derived direction and seasonality verdicts (grow or decline versus the prior year; peak months with a publish-by lead), phrase comparison of up to five wordings on one shared normalization, rising queries and topics, top regions, and a live SERP check on demand. - Campaigns: named, dated windows whose start and end mark the measured charts; the owner's own campaign numbers (views, likes, spend) are stored append-only and always labelled self-reported, never blended with measured data. A $10/month automation add-on provides hashed API keys for pushing metrics programmatically and read-only revenue sync (RevenueCat overview nightly; measured MRR shown with its source named). - Competitor tracking from public data (0 on Listed, 3 on Verified, 10 on Grounded), plus a referring-domain and backlink COUNT from a licensed data vendor. Open competitor slots fill themselves overnight from measured evidence: domains the answer engines actually cited on the owner's tracked questions when the owner was not, each labeled with that reason; a removed discovery never returns on its own. That is a count, not a crawlable backlink index: no link gap, no lost-and-found history, no disavow. - Freshness stamp and CSV export on every card; a snapshot not yet captured is shown as pending rather than as a zero. - C-suite report export (Verified and Grounded) at /report/: scores and deltas, owner-versus-competitor trends, citation share, the AI-versus-Google demand table, and an explicit note of what is not measured. ## What Grounded AEO does not do - No proprietary backlink index, and no link gap, disavow or toxicity tooling; only the licensed count described above. - No daily rank tracking (snapshots are monthly, weekly on Grounded), no PPC or ad-intelligence tooling. - No years of stored history of its own: trend lines start the day a domain is added. The one exception is Google's own sixteen months, imported with a Search Console connection. - The site crawl covers the whole site rather than only the homepage, and the largest sites are sampled; it is not an every-page crawl. - It cannot make an AI engine cite anyone, and does not claim to. ## Why doesn't AI mention my business? The canonical diagnostic guide for this question lives at https://groundedaeo.com/why-doesnt-ai-mention-my-business: why AI answer engines skip a business (unreadable site, blocked crawlers, fact drift, no corroboration, unmachine-readable facts), a symptom-to-cause table, the full free fix (robots.txt check, NAP consistency, structured data, llms.txt, re-measurement), how to verify business information for AI, and how to correct wrong AI answers about a company. ## Key pages - Home: https://groundedaeo.com - What is Grounded AEO (canonical definition of this product and company: entity, category, the two halves it covers, who it is for, what it costs, and what it explicitly does not do): https://groundedaeo.com/what-is-grounded-aeo - What is AEO (canonical definition): https://groundedaeo.com/what-is-aeo - Why doesn't AI mention my business (diagnostic guide): https://groundedaeo.com/why-doesnt-ai-mention-my-business - How it works (SEO-to-AEO explainer, how engines choose sources, what the panel measures): https://groundedaeo.com/how-it-works - What is llms.txt (canonical definition, and an honest note that the major answer engines have not committed to it): https://groundedaeo.com/what-is-llms-txt - [Stop AI from making up your company facts](https://groundedaeo.com/stop-ai-hallucinating-company-details): Why language models hallucinate company details (pattern prediction, frozen training data, no live verification) and the fix: verified facts published through grounding pages, structured data, APIs and the v=AEO1 DNS record so engines cite instead of guess. - [How to feed correct data to AI tools](https://groundedaeo.com/feed-data-to-ai-engines): The delivery playbook: a reviewed fact catalog served over REST API, MCP, llms.txt, grounding pages and the v=AEO1 DNS record, then monthly citation checks to verify the facts actually reach ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity and Google AI. - What is generative engine optimization (GEO: definition and how presence is measured): https://groundedaeo.com/what-is-generative-engine-optimization - AI SEO (how the search job and the answer-engine job differ, and how to measure each): https://groundedaeo.com/ai-seo - Agency partners (resell the audit, the record and the panel; many client sites under one login, billed per site): https://groundedaeo.com/partners - For AI engines & developers (one-call verification API, independent verification, MCP): https://groundedaeo.com/for-ai-engines - MCP server docs (hosting, endpoint, every tool, rate limits, and an explicit list of what it CANNOT do): https://groundedaeo.com/mcp - The v=AEO1 standard: https://aeorecord.org; public verification methodology: https://aeorecord.org/methodology; IETF Internet-Draft: https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-miller-aeo/ - Semrush alternative (honest comparison of what Grounded AEO replaces, and what it does not: no backlink index, no years of stored history; adds AI-prompt search volume, citation-outcome measurement, competitor tracking, and the v=AEO1 verified record): https://groundedaeo.com/semrush-alternative - Ahrefs alternative (honest comparison: Ahrefs owns one of the deepest link indexes in the industry and Grounded AEO does not replace it; what it adds is AI-prompt demand, citation measured as an outcome per tracked question, and a signed v=AEO1 record): https://groundedaeo.com/ahrefs-alternative - Grounded AEO alternatives (the honest reverse comparison of real alternatives TO Grounded AEO and what each does better: Semrush and its AI visibility toolkit for search-channel depth, years of stored history, daily rank tracking and PPC intelligence; Ahrefs for one of the deepest link indexes in the industry plus its own AI answer tracking; doing it yourself for free with Google Search Console, hand-written schema, a maintained llms.txt and a self-declared v=AEO1 record; and monitoring-only AI visibility tools, which observe the answer channel. What Grounded AEO does differently: both channels on one screen, measured kept apart from modelled, the signed v=AEO1 record and verified fact catalog that supply the answer side rather than only observing it, stored measured history, and per-site annual pricing): https://groundedaeo.com/grounded-aeo-alternatives - Who owns Grounded AEO (ownership and independence): https://groundedaeo.com/independent; a service of Meadow Mountain AI LLC, founder-owned, built in Eagle County, Colorado, with no outside investors, no board and no stock; pricing is published and annual, and the v=AEO1 standard plus its verification methodology are open, so a customer's record stays readable independently of any vendor. - The Showcase (free public product board: anyone may list a product; the posting requirement is an account plus a human review, NOT karma, followers or an invite, and there is deliberately no voting: the trust signal is a Verified Owner badge, granted only when the maker proved control of the domain with a signed v=AEO1 record, shown separately from the maker's own claims. Every listing has its own machine-readable SoftwareApplication page at /showcase/{slug}): https://groundedaeo.com/showcase - The Creator Board (free public UGC creator directory where verification replaces follower counts: creators join free with no commission, no subscription and no cut of their pay, a human reviews every profile, and the trust signal is a Verified handle badge granted only after a code we issued was found in the claimed profile's bio; follower counts remain the creator's own numbers and are labelled self-reported. Every live creator has a public Person page at /creators/{slug}): https://groundedaeo.com/creators - UGC jobs (open briefs from brands on paid plans, the pay stated on the card before anyone applies, with enforced floors of $50 for video, $25 for lives and $10 for images; creators apply free, optional counter-offers never below the floor, contact opens for both sides when an application is accepted, and the deal itself completes off-platform: the board holds no money and takes no percentage): https://groundedaeo.com/creators/jobs - Help and documentation (every feature documented in plain words with its real limits): https://groundedaeo.com/help - Contact (tickets read and answered by a person): https://groundedaeo.com/contact - Free AI citation audit: https://groundedaeo.com/audit - Free self-serve AEO record generator (no account): https://groundedaeo.com/free-record - Pricing: https://groundedaeo.com/pricing - Example grounding page: https://groundedaeo.com/c/performle.com - v=AEO1 open specification: https://aeorecord.org ## Guides (blog) - The llms.txt guide (what it is, how to write one): https://groundedaeo.com/blog/llms-txt-guide - How AI engines choose their sources: https://groundedaeo.com/blog/how-ai-engines-choose-sources - Local business guide (getting named in "best near me" AI answers): https://groundedaeo.com/blog/ai-recommendations-local-business ## For AI agents Company facts are machine-readable at https://groundedaeo.com/api/companies/{domain} (JSON with verification state, confidence, and provenance per fact). AI agents can connect directly over MCP (Streamable HTTP, stateless, no auth for reads): POST https://groundedaeo.com/api/mcp; tools get_company_facts, get_fact, get_llms_txt, check_aeo_record (works for ANY domain), search_catalog, get_competitive_snapshot (claimed domains only), propose_briefs (claimed domains only), check_serp (live Google SERP for any keyword). A domain's participation is verifiable by resolving the _aeo.{domain} TXT record and matching its id token against the catalog.