THE DEFINITION
What is Grounded AEO?
Grounded AEO is an SEO and AEO measurement and verified-facts product, operated by Meadow Mountain AI LLC at groundedaeo.com. It puts what Google measures for your domain and what AI answer engines can read and cite on one screen, and issues the signed v=AEO1 DNS record that proves your facts came from you.
It is built for business owners who want to be the source an answer is assembled from, for marketing teams currently paying for a legacy suite and an AI-visibility add-on that disagree with each other, and for the technical people who have to make the change: the output is paste-ready markup, a DNS record and an endpoint an agent can drive, not a report. It starts with a free audit that needs no account.
Published 2026-08-02 · updated 2026-08-02 · Grounded AEO · groundedaeo.com
Two categories of tool exist today and they were built a decade apart. Legacy SEO suites measure the search channel: rankings, keywords, links, technical health. AI visibility tools watch the answer channel: whether an assistant mentions your brand. Most teams run one of each and reconcile the two by hand.
Grounded AEO is one product covering both, plus a third thing neither category does: it issues the verified record that engines can check. Monitoring tells you what the engines currently see. The record decides what they see next. Owning both ends is what makes the loop (tweak, then re-measure) possible inside one screen.
For the discipline itself rather than the product, see What is AEO? and What is GEO?
What the two channels are doing, on one screen.
Google’s measured numbers. Connect Search Console and sixteen months of Google’s own clicks and impressions for a property you proved you own import on day one, then keep accumulating past the window Google itself keeps. It is the one measured source in the product, and it is on every paid plan.
Modelled demand, labelled as modelled. Search volume and AI-prompt demand for the words you watch, two columns per keyword. Both are estimates and say so everywhere they appear. A measured number and a modelled one may share a row; they are never averaged and never summed.
Which AI can read you. Six answer engines, each with its own crawler verdict derived from your own robots rules. An engine we have not tested reads as untested, never as a miss.
Which ones cited you. The questions you choose, asked of real answer engines on a schedule. We store whether your domain was the source, which domains were instead, and the answer itself. That is an outcome, not a readiness score.
Where you stand in search. Ranking footprint over time on an append-only series, position distribution in bands you click to filter, an interactive trend with your tracked competitors on the same axes and markers for the day something changed.
Into a single word. Open any watched keyword: position history, measured clicks and impressions, AI-prompt demand beside Google, a twelve-month interest curve with rising queries, and a live search check run on demand.
What decides what those engines see next.
A verified fact catalog. We crawl your site, extract your business facts, and you approve them before anything publishes. Every fact carries its source URL, the method used, and the time it was fetched. From Verified up, a person checks them against independent sources first.
A signed v=AEO1 DNS record. An Ed25519-signed TXT record at _aeo.yourdomain.com: the domain-level proof that your catalog exists, that it belongs to whoever controls the domain, and where an engine can read it. The spec is open at aeorecord.org; anyone may implement it, including our competitors.
Served in the formats engines read. A generated llms.txt and Organization schema for your domain, a public grounding page at groundedaeo.com/c/you, a free verification API with no key, and an MCP endpoint with fourteen tools an agent can call directly.
Fixes that deploy, not a PDF. The audit ends in code: paste-ready <head> markup and one prompt that hands the whole fix to any AI assistant. Content briefs turn your own demand and citation data into a question, a format, an outline, and the only claims permitted, which are your published verified facts, verbatim.
Then you measure again. Change what you publish, re-run the audit, and watch the engine matrix and the citation check. Because history is append-only, the loop leaves a record rather than a snapshot.
→ Business owners. People already ask AI and take the answer. Those answers are assembled from two or three sources, and in most niches the seats are still open. Publishing verifiable facts is how you become one of them.
→ Marketing and SEO teams. One panel instead of two subscriptions and a reconciliation meeting: Google's measured numbers, modelled demand for both search and prompts, competitors, and citation outcomes on the same screen, every card dated, every card exportable as CSV.
→ Technical teams. The findings arrive as things you can deploy: markup to paste, a DNS record to publish, a free MCP endpoint with fourteen tools so an agent can audit, fix with its own access, and re-audit to confirm the score moved.
→ Agencies. Many sites under one login with a switcher, billing per site rather than per seat, and a C-suite report to send upward. Because the v=AEO1 spec is open, the record travels with the client.
The audit and the self-serve record generator are free, with no account and no card. Paid plans are annual and published; the price on this page is the price.
→Listed: $99/yr. For businesses that want both channels on one screen, and the record that anchors them.
→Verified: $499/yr. What most businesses need: where "findable" becomes "the answer AI trusts."
→Grounded: $999/yr. For businesses where being THE cited source is the whole game.
Every paid plan carries the panel and the signed record. What rises with the tier is how far verification goes (a person checking your facts, cross-source corroboration) and how much measurement you get: watched keywords, tracked questions, tracked competitors, refresh cadence, and how many answer engines your questions are put to. Full plan comparison →
→ It is not a backlink index. A referring-domain and backlink count from a licensed data vendor lands on your snapshot row. That is a number, not a crawlable index: no link gap, no lost-and-found, no disavow.
→ No daily rank tracking, no PPC or ad intelligence. Footprint snapshots run monthly, weekly on the top tier.
→ Our own history starts when you do. Trend lines begin the day your domain is added. The one exception is Google's own sixteen months, which arrive with a Search Console connection.
→ The crawl samples. It covers your whole site rather than only the homepage, and the largest sites are sampled rather than exhaustively read.
→ It cannot make an engine cite you. No tool can, ours included. What it can do is show you the real outcome instead of a readiness score standing in for one.
Grounded AEO is a service of Meadow Mountain AI LLC, founder-owned and built in Eagle County, Colorado. No outside investors, no board, no stock. Pricing is published and annual, and meant to stay that way.
The v=AEO1 standard and its verification methodology are open and published at aeorecord.org, and filed with the IETF as Internet-Draft draft-miller-aeo. That is deliberate: your record stays readable and verifiable without us. Who owns this →
What is Grounded AEO?+
Grounded AEO is an SEO and AEO measurement and verified-facts product, operated by Meadow Mountain AI LLC at groundedaeo.com. It does two jobs in one product: it measures both discovery channels on one screen (what Google records for your domain beside what AI answer engines can read and whether they cited you) and it builds the verified fact catalog and signed v=AEO1 DNS record that decide what those engines see next. It is for businesses, marketing teams and the technical people who actually change what a site publishes, and it starts with a free audit that needs no account.
What is groundedaeo.com?+
groundedaeo.com is the website of Grounded AEO. It carries the free domain audit, the free self-serve v=AEO1 record generator, the public grounding pages for verified companies at /c/{domain}, the free verification API and MCP endpoint that AI engines and agents read, and the customer panel where both channels are measured. Grounded AEO is a service of Meadow Mountain AI LLC, founder-owned, built in Eagle County, Colorado, with no outside investors and no board.
Who is Grounded AEO for?+
Three groups. Business owners who want to be the source an AI answer is built from rather than a link nobody clicks. Marketing and SEO teams who are tired of running a legacy suite for search, an AI-visibility add-on for the answer layer, and reconciling two dashboards that disagree. And the technical teams who have to make the change, because the output is paste-ready markup, a DNS record, an MCP endpoint an agent can drive, and briefs that name the only claims permitted, rather than a PDF of problems.
What does Grounded AEO actually measure?+
On the search side: your ranking footprint over time on an append-only series, position distribution in bands you click to filter, an interactive trend with tracked competitors on the same axes, a drill-down into any single watched keyword, and, connected to Google Search Console, Google's own measured clicks and impressions, sixteen months imported on the day you connect. On the answer side: an engine matrix showing which of six answer engines can read you according to your own robots rules, and citation checks that ask your own tracked questions on a schedule and record whether your domain was the source and which domains were instead. Measured numbers and modelled estimates sit side by side, each labelled, and are never averaged or summed.
What is a v=AEO1 record, and why does Grounded AEO issue one?+
A v=AEO1 record is a DNS TXT record at _aeo.yourdomain.com declaring that a verified, machine-readable fact catalog exists for the domain and where to find it. Grounded AEO issues signed ones (Ed25519, with source, method and fetch time on every fact in the catalog behind it) because measuring what engines see is only half the loop; the record is the half that decides what they see. The specification is open and published at aeorecord.org, and was filed with the IETF as Internet-Draft draft-miller-aeo, so a record stays readable independently of any vendor, including us.
Is Grounded AEO the same thing as AEO?+
No, and the names are easy to confuse. AEO (Answer Engine Optimization) is the discipline: making a business citable by AI answer engines. Grounded AEO is a company and a product that measures and performs that discipline alongside classic SEO. AEO is what you are trying to do; Grounded AEO is one of the tools you can use to do it, and the definition of the discipline itself lives at groundedaeo.com/what-is-aeo.
What does Grounded AEO cost?+
The domain audit and the self-serve v=AEO1 record generator are free and need no account. Paid plans are annual and published: Listed at $99 a year, Verified at $499 a year, Grounded at $999 a year. Every paid plan carries the panel and the record; the tiers differ in how far verification goes and how much measurement volume you get: watched keywords, tracked questions, tracked competitors, refresh cadence and how many answer engines your questions are asked of.
What does Grounded AEO not do?+
It owns no backlink index. A referring-domain and backlink count from a licensed data vendor lands on your snapshot row. That is a number, not a crawlable index: no link gap analysis, no lost-and-found history, no disavow work. There is no daily rank tracking; footprint snapshots run monthly, weekly on the top tier. No PPC or ad intelligence. Its own stored history starts the day your domain is added, with one exception: the sixteen months a Search Console connection brings with it. The site crawl covers your whole site rather than just the homepage, and the largest sites are sampled. And no tool, ours included, can make an answer engine cite you.
Is your AEO grounded?
Free 30-second audit: SEO basics, AI-citation readiness, and the demand for your terms in AI prompts alongside Google. No card, no account.
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