A Grounding Map is a crawlable relationship layer that shows how a website defines, connects and supports its important entities, topics, products, services, people, brands, evidence and machine-readable resources.
Specification v0.1 describes this as a directory-based index layer: a visible place where important website resources are organized as relationships, not left as isolated pages.
Grounding Pages define stable facts. A Grounding Map shows how those facts belong together across a website. On larger websites, important information is distributed across products, services, categories, people, brands, articles, evidence and machine-readable files.
The map gives those resources a visible relationship structure, so intended connections do not have to be inferred from isolated pages. It complements Grounding Pages instead of replacing them.
Named entities, definitions, concepts and canonical explanations.
Commercial pages, service areas, categories and offers.
Authors, experts, organizations, brands and ownership signals.
Explanatory pages that provide context around stable facts.
Source pages, proof points, examples and supporting materials.
.md.txt, llms.txt, JSON resources and structured data companions.
It explains relationships, not only URL discovery.
It can expose relationships that are not primary menu choices.
It documents definitions, evidence and machine-readable companions.
The model is not a loose list of entities. It describes where the map lives, which pages it connects and how evidence and machine-readable resources support the relationships.
A stable path such as /facts/ or /fakten/ that holds the map and its pages.
The directory landing page that lists important resources and shows how they connect.
Stable pages for entities, concepts, people, brands, products or services that need clear definition.
Typed links between the index page, Grounding Pages, related resources, articles and supporting files.
Pages, source references and examples that support a page or relationship.
.md.txt, llms.txt, JSON resources and structured data companions.
marcdeboer.de/fakten/ is the first reference implementation used to derive Specification v0.1.
On marcdeboer.de, the /fakten/ directory acts as a map index. Individual facts pages such
as /fakten/grounding-map/, /fakten/seo-entropie/ and
/fakten/search-reality/ define stable concepts. Blog articles explain the ideas around
those pages, while text twins and resource files make parts of the structure machine-readable.
grounding-map.com maintains a smaller public specification and example environment at /facts/. It documents the pattern without claiming that the model is finished or externally standardized.
Directory, index page, Grounding Pages, relationship layer, evidence and versioning rules.
Fields for map index URL, Grounding Page URL, evidence, related pages and machine-readable files.
marcdeboer.de as reference implementation, plus secondary generic website patterns.
Schema, templates, example JSON, text twins and llms.txt for the v0.1 model.