Description
AI answer engines (ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Google AI) increasingly answer questions about your business by piecing together whatever they can scrape. When the scraps are messy, they guess, and sometimes they guess wrong.
Grounded AEO gives them something better to read. Fill in one form and your site publishes:
/.well-known/aeo.json– your facts in the open v=AEO1 format (aeorecord.org)/llms.txt– a plain-text digest AI crawlers understand- Organization schema and a
rel="aeo"discovery link in every page head
Everything updates the moment you save the form. Nothing to write by hand, nothing to keep in sync.
The plugin also shows you the optional _aeo DNS TXT record that announces your record to engines, with a one-click check to confirm it is live.
Honest labeling. Records published by this plugin are self-declared: they state what you say about your business. Verified records (domain-control proof, cryptographic signature, weekly measurement of whether engines actually cite you) are a separate service at groundedaeo.com. The plugin is fully functional without it.
Open standard. v=AEO1 is an open, unowned format documented at aeorecord.org, with a published IETF Internet-Draft (draft-miller-aeo). This plugin is one implementation; anyone can build another.
External services
This plugin serves its records entirely from your own site. One optional feature contacts an external service:
Google Public DNS (DNS-over-HTTPS) is used only by the “Check my DNS” button on the Publish tab, and only when you click it. It queries https://dns.google/resolve from your browser to look up the optional _aeo TXT record on your own domain, so the request contains your site’s hostname and nothing else. No request is made from your server, and nothing runs automatically. This service is provided by Google: terms of service, privacy policy.
The “Run the free audit” link on the Publish tab is an ordinary link to groundedaeo.com that opens in your browser; the plugin itself sends no data there.
Screenshots
Installation
- Install and activate the plugin.
- Go to Settings, then Grounded AEO.
- Fill in your business facts and save.
- Your record is live at /.well-known/aeo.json – the Publish tab links to everything being served.
FAQ
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Does this replace my SEO plugin?
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No. It publishes machine-readable facts for AI answer engines. It coexists with Yoast, Rank Math and similar plugins. If another plugin already outputs Organization schema, you can keep either; duplicate Organization blocks are tolerated by crawlers but tidier to avoid.
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I already have an llms.txt file
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The plugin detects a physical llms.txt in your web root and steps aside; yours is served untouched.
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What data does the plugin send anywhere?
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None. It serves files from your own site. The optional DNS check calls Google’s public DNS-over-HTTPS endpoint from your browser, and nothing else leaves your server.
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Contributors & Developers
“Grounded AEO” is open source software. The following people have contributed to this plugin.
Contributors
Translate “Grounded AEO” into your language.
Interested in development?
Browse the code, check out the SVN repository, or subscribe to the development log by RSS.
Changelog
1.0.0
- First release: facts form, aeo.json, llms.txt, Organization schema, rel=aeo link, DNS helper.