Grounds

In 2025 a Google AI Overview told searchers that a Minnesota solar installer was being sued by the state Attorney General. It wasn't. The answer cited four sources, and none of them contained the claim. The company reported losing a $150,000 contract.

Google corrected that answer, which is the point: generative answers change underneath you, so this has to be measured continuously, not checked once.

• 01
  Existing tools measure visibility, not truth

  AI-visibility tools track whether a brand is mentioned and with what sentiment. None check whether the cited sources actually support the sentence they're attached to.

• 02
  Answers differ by geography

  Generative answers diverge across regions, and a company can't see what searchers in other markets are shown. So location is treated as a variable.

• 03
  Suppression is data

  Google often hides AI Overviews on adverse queries. Grounds records that as a measurement instead of an error.

• 04
  An unreadable source must never become an accusation

  Paywalled or blocked sources get UNVERIFIABLE, which is excluded from scoring.

1. Docketing: the entity, its aliases, locales and look-alike names.
2. Line of questioning: factual, operational and adverse probes, like real searches.
3. Deposition: probes run across engines and locations, stored as append-only observations.
4. Claim decomposition: answers split into single claims, each bound to its citations.
5. Cross-examination: each claim checked against cited pages and independent searches.
6. Scoring and remedy: attribution integrity, plus the one source to fix first.

• 01
  A legal vocabulary

  Docket, deposition, cross-examination, dossier. The metaphor tells you what the tool does before you read a line of docs.

• 02
  Red is reserved for defects

  Only claims counted against the entity are red. Grounded is black, excluded is grey.

• 03
  The dossier prints

  It's designed to be saved as a PDF and handed to someone, so it reads top-down like a report.

Screens from the live site and the recorded Wolf River Electric dossier.