Most tools ask you to prove you own a domain before they will do anything. LLM Metrix does not, and the reason is worth stating up front: tracking what AI engines say about a domain is observation of public data, and tracking a competitor’s domain is a first-class use case. Gating scans on ownership would break the product for the people who need it most.
So verification here is not a door you must walk through. It is a key that unlocks the specific things where an unproven claim would cost somebody else.
| Tier | Method | What it unlocks |
|---|---|---|
| 0 | none | Scanning, rankings, citations, competitor tracking |
| 1 | Meta tag | AI Traffic log ingest, the verified badge |
| 2 | DNS TXT record | A white-label report domain of your own |
Both methods will be familiar if you have verified a property in Google Search Console, which offers the same two proofs for the same reason: a meta tag proves you can publish on the site, a DNS record proves you control the domain itself. The second is the stronger claim, which is why it unlocks more here.
Step 1: Decide whether you need to verify at all
If you are monitoring a domain — yours or anyone’s — and reading rankings, citations and competitor data, you need nothing. Everything on those pages works at tier 0 and always will.
You need tier 1 if you intend to upload your own server access logs to the AI Traffic page. Ingesting logs is a claim about a site’s own visitors, and those rows become that project’s crawler analytics — accepting them for a domain you had not proved you control would be a data-poisoning primitive.
You need tier 2 if you want to serve client-facing reports from your own hostname instead of ours. That one is not a nicety, and Step 5 explains why.
Step 2: Open the Domain ownership card
Go to Domains in the Optimise group of the sidebar. The page opens on your active project: a Primary Domain card at the top (editable, with a Save button), then Domain ownership.
The card’s own subtitle repeats the framing — verification is optional, scanning and citations work without it, and what it buys you is log upload and a white-label host. Its icon is a grey shield until you hold any tier, then a green check; at tier 2 a DNS verified pill appears next to the heading.
Underneath are two rows, Meta tag and DNS TXT record, each with a status pill:
- Not started — no token issued yet
- Awaiting check — token issued, never checked
- Not found yet — a check ran and failed
- Verified — proven
- Re-verify — the proof no longer matches the project’s current domain (see Step 7)
Owners, admins and members can all issue tokens and run checks — the same bar as editing the project’s domain, since anyone who can point a project at a domain may as well be allowed to prove it. Viewers cannot.
Domain ownership
Optional. Scanning, rankings and citations work without this — proving ownership unlocks uploading your own traffic logs and using northwind.co as a white-label report domain.
Meta tag
Awaiting checkUnlocks AI Traffic log ingest and the verified badge.
Add this meta tag to your home page
- Copy the tag below.
- Paste it inside the <head> of https://northwind.co.
- Publish, then click Check.
<meta name="llmmetrix-site-verification" content="lm_9f3c1a77b204e8d5" />DNS TXT record
Not startedLets you serve reports from your own domain (white-label).
Step 3: Verify with a meta tag (tier 1)
On the Meta tag row, click Set up. That issues a random server-generated token and expands the instructions:
<meta name="llmmetrix-site-verification" content="YOUR-TOKEN" />
Copy it with the button beside the snippet, paste it into the <head> of your home page, publish,
and click Check.
Three things about this method are worth knowing before you use it:
- Leave the tag in place. Removing it invalidates the verification — a re-check will fail.
- The check fetches your home page, https first and http only as a fallback, through the same hardened fetcher the rest of the product uses.
- It obeys your robots.txt. If your robots.txt disallows our crawler, the check refuses rather than sneaking past, and tells you so — with a pointer to the DNS method, which needs no fetch at all and grants a higher tier anyway.
Tier 1 is the method to reach for when you need log ingest quickly. A marketing team can publish a meta tag in five minutes; a DNS change is often a ticket.
Meta tag
Awaiting checkUnlocks AI Traffic log ingest and the verified badge.
Add this meta tag to your home page
- Copy the tag below.
- Paste it inside the <head> of https://northwind.co.
- Publish, then click Check.
<meta name="llmmetrix-site-verification" content="lm_9f3c1a77b204e8d5" />Step 4: Verify with a DNS TXT record (tier 2)
On the DNS TXT record row, click Set up. The snippet is a single value:
llmmetrix-verification=YOUR-TOKEN
In your DNS provider, add a TXT record for the domain, using @ (or a blank host) to target the
domain itself, paste the value, save, and click Check. DNS usually applies within minutes but
can take up to an hour, and the checker is throttled to ten checks per minute per project — enough
to poll while you wait.
Proof scopes downward only. Proving acme.com covers reports.acme.com, because control of a
domain implies control of everything under it. Proving blog.acme.com says nothing about
acme.com — subdomains are routinely delegated to third parties, and that tenant must not be able
to claim the parent.
Tier 2 supersedes tier 1: a DNS proof unlocks everything the meta tag did and more.
Step 5: Spend tier 2 on a white-label domain
The white-label host lets you serve shared reports and the dashboard from a domain your clients recognise. It requires tier 2, and the reason is structural rather than procedural.
That setting is stored in a column that is globally unique across the entire platform. Exactly
one workspace can hold reports.acme.com. If the field accepted any string, the first account to
type a name would take it from every other tenant — permanently, including from the company that
actually owns the domain. DNS control is the right bar precisely because a custom domain is a DNS
delegation: anyone who can point a CNAME at us can write a TXT record, so the proof costs a
legitimate owner nothing and stops a squatter completely.
Enforcement lives in the branding API rather than in a form: the write is refused unless some
project in the workspace holds a tier-2 proof whose domain covers the host you are claiming, and
white-label itself requires the Business or Agency plan. There is no custom-domain field in
Settings → Branding today — the claim is made through PATCH /api/workspaces/[id]/branding by an
owner or admin. Clearing the field needs no proof; giving a domain up is always allowed.
Step 6: Handle the failures you will actually hit
A failed check leaves its reason on the row in amber, and the messages are written to be acted on:
- “No
llmmetrix-site-verificationtag found” — usually a CDN still serving a cached copy of your home page. Purge and re-check. - “Found a tag, but its content did not match your token” — a partial copy. Copy the whole value with the button.
- “No TXT records found” or “no
llmmetrix-verification=…record” — propagation, most of the time. Wait and re-check. - “Found a record, but its token did not match” — an old record from a previous attempt. Remove it and add the current one.
- A robots.txt refusal — allow our crawler, or switch to the DNS method.
Re-issuing a token does not rotate one you already published for the same domain: clicking through the flow again reuses the live token rather than silently invalidating the DNS record you added an hour ago and are still waiting on.
Meta tag
Not found yetUnlocks AI Traffic log ingest and the verified badge.
No llmmetrix-site-verification tag found on https://northwind.co. If you have just published, your CDN may still be serving a cached copy — purge and re-check.
Add this meta tag to your home page
- Copy the tag below.
- Paste it inside the <head> of https://northwind.co.
- Publish, then click Check.
<meta name="llmmetrix-site-verification" content="lm_9f3c1a77b204e8d5" />DNS TXT record
Awaiting checkLets you serve reports from your own domain (white-label).
Add this TXT record to your DNS
- Copy the value below.
- Add a TXT record on northwind.co with host @ (or blank).
- Save, wait for propagation, then click Check.
llmmetrix-verification=lm_2b7e40c9d1a6f38eStep 7: Keep proofs valid when the domain changes
Editing a project’s Primary Domain deletes that project’s existing proofs. This is not a bug to
work around — a proof of acme.com must not survive the project being re-pointed at a domain the
workspace does not control, or verification would mean nothing.
If a stale proof does linger, the card reports it as Re-verify rather than hiding it, with the reason spelled out: the proof was issued for the old domain, and the project now points somewhere else. A check in that state refuses rather than testing the wrong host. Issue a fresh token for the new domain and run the method again.
Practical consequence: if you are migrating a domain, expect to redo verification afterwards, and
re-check anything that depended on it — log upload will start returning domain_not_verified the
moment the tier drops.
Step 8: Where to go next
- Monitoring AI Traffic and Crawlers — the tier-1 capability, and what to do with it once it is unlocked.
- AEO for agencies — where a white-label reporting domain earns its keep.
- Technical SEO for AEO — the wider set of site-level signals verification sits alongside.
- Citation intelligence — one of the tier-0 surfaces that keeps working on any domain, verified or not.