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Licence

OpenAEO is MIT licensed. The name is a trademark.

The OpenAEO audit engine is MIT licensed and free for commercial use, including inside an agency, with no headcount limit and no revenue threshold. That covers the 5 retrieval gates, the 8 headline checks, the generators for robots.txt, llms.txt and JSON-LD, the CLI and the MCP server. There is no commercial licence to negotiate, because we sell the hosted service rather than permission to run the code. What MIT does not cover is the name: "OpenAEO" and the logo are trademarks, so a fork may run the engine but may not present itself as the official OpenAEO product. This page states the whole position in one place, because a licence that needs an email to explain it is not a licence anyone can plan around.

What you can do without asking

The full text is in LICENSE in the repository. It is the standard MIT text, unmodified.

The one limit: the name

"OpenAEO" and the OpenAEO logo are trademarks of OpenAEO and are not licensed under the MIT License. Forks and derivative works may use this code freely, but must not use the OpenAEO name or logo in a way that suggests endorsement, affiliation, or that they are the official OpenAEO product or service.

In practice: "AEO auditing, built on OpenAEO" is fine. "OpenAEO Pro, by our agency" is not. This is the same shape of notice Rust, Node and Kubernetes each use, and it is compatible with MIT rather than an exception to it.

Where the line falls

MIT, yours to runHosted, ours to run
5 retrieval gates and 8 headline checksThe full 49-check weighted rubric, tracked over time
Per-bot edge fetches across 9 crawlersWeekly citation testing across 6 assistant surfaces
Generated robots.txt, llms.txt and JSON-LDDrift alerts when a passing check regresses
The CLI and the MCP serverCompetitor share-of-voice
Every commit, readable and forkableYour accumulated audit and citation history

The split is not about withholding the useful half. Fixing a site is mostly a one-time job, and everything you need for it is in the package. Whether an assistant names you changes every week, and that has to keep running whether or not anyone is watching. A fork gets the free tier on day one; it cannot get a year of your history, because history has to be accumulated rather than copied.

Why there is no commercial licence

We considered a source-available licence with a company-size threshold, and decided against it. Two reasons, both practical. An MCP server gets adopted because it installs with no friction, and anything non-permissive reads as friction to both developers and registries. And a commercial licence is not a product you list, it is negotiating, invoicing and enforcing, one agency at a time. The Enterprise tier is the version of that which sells itself, so that is the one we kept.

If you are an agency deciding whether to build on this: you are the intended user, you owe us nothing, and the thing we would like to sell you is measurement, not permission.

Questions

Can my agency use OpenAEO on client sites commercially?+
Yes. The audit engine, CLI and MCP server are MIT licensed. You can run them on client work, bill for that work, modify them, and ship them inside your own tooling. There is no headcount limit, no revenue threshold, and no commercial licence to buy. You do not need our permission and you do not need to tell us.
Do I need to buy a commercial licence?+
No, and there is not one to buy. We decided against a source-available licence with a revenue threshold. The recurring product is weekly citation testing across six assistant surfaces, which runs on our infrastructure and accumulates history a copy cannot start with. We sell that service rather than permission to run the code.
Can I rebrand OpenAEO and sell it as my own product?+
You can fork the code and ship it under your own name. You cannot use the OpenAEO name or logo in a way that suggests endorsement, affiliation, or that your fork is the official OpenAEO product. MIT licenses the code; it does not license the trademark. Say it is based on OpenAEO, do not say it is OpenAEO.
What exactly is MIT licensed, and what is not?+
MIT covers everything in the openaeo-audit package: the 5 retrieval gates, the 8 headline checks, the per-bot edge fetches, the generators for robots.txt, llms.txt and JSON-LD, the CLI and the MCP server. Not MIT: the hosted service at openaeo.dev, which is the 49-check weighted rubric tracked over time, weekly citation testing, drift alerts, competitor share-of-voice and audit history. That runs on our infrastructure and is not distributed.
Will the licence change later?+
Every version already published under MIT stays MIT, and anyone may fork from it. That is a property of the licence and not a promise we could withdraw. If a future component needs different terms it will ship as a separate package with those terms stated up front, rather than by relicensing this one.

This page describes our licensing position. It is not legal advice, and it does not replace the licence text itself. If you need something in writing for a procurement process, email [email protected].

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