AEO Spotlight's monitoring engine is a consumable API. Verdict-aware citations, 4-tier visibility gaps, competitor snapshots, and the content lifecycle as clean JSON, async by design, with one credit ledger.
Ground truth they can act on: verified, explainable, and permissioned.
From Dashboard → Developer → API Keys. Keys are hash-stored, shown once, and instantly revocable, with read, read_write, and publish scopes.
curl https://api.aeospotlight.com/api/v1/me \
-H "X-API-Key: aeo_live_YOUR_KEY" Every paid operation returns 202 + a jobId. Poll it, or get an HMAC-signed webhook the moment it finishes.
Every citation returns a DetectionVerdict with confidence and evidence: GroundedCitation, ExactCleanMatch, AmbiguousOnly, or NotDetected.
Query runs, gap detection, and content generation return 202 + a job id. Idempotent retries, charge-on-success, per-provider partial results.
HMAC-SHA256-signed events: mention.detected, gap.detected, content.published, content.cited, credit signals, and more. No polling loops.
Per-key rate limits and daily credit ceilings, one shared credit ledger, instant revoke. A misbehaving agent can't drain your balance.
Autonomy tiers: L0 manual → L1 auto-propose → L2 auto-publish (earned: 20+ approvals at 95%+).
TypeScript & Python SDKs and an MCP server are on the roadmap.