Elmo
Open-source AI visibility tracking and Answer Engine Optimization for ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews
If you want AEO data you can audit instead of license, Elmo is the pick — self-hosted costs nothing but Docker time and you can read every metric in the repo. The cloud tiers are priced sanely at $29–$649/mo with unlimited seats and API/MCP access on every plan, but Starter is ChatGPT-only at 1×/day, so most teams land on Basic at $99/mo to get any four platforms sampled 4×/day. Closed rivals like Profound still ship more polish; Elmo ships more control and more sampling frequency for the money.
Verified 4d ago · liveness 80/100 · cite: rightaichoice.com/tools/elmo
- Marketing and SEO teams tracking how ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews describe their brand
- AEO and GEO specialists who want to inspect or modify the scoring code instead of trusting a vendor dashboard
- Agencies white-labeling AI visibility reporting for clients with custom branding, domain, and SSO
- Privacy-conscious or regulated teams that need the platform running on their own infrastructure
- Teams with zero infrastructure appetite that also need multi-engine tracking — Cloud Starter is ChatGPT-only at $29/mo
- Buyers who want AI visibility tied into CRM, ad platform, or campaign automation workflows
- Anyone expecting built-in content generation or automated outreach beyond ranked recommendations
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Skip Elmo if you want AI visibility data wired into CRM, ad-platform, or campaign automation — Elmo is AEO-only and stops at ranked recommendations rather than executing changes for you.
Self-hosting is free, but your own LLM provider and scraper API keys are not — BrightData, DataForSEO, Oxylabs, Cloro, Olostep, and SearchApi.io usage bills straight to your accounts.
Cloud entry at $29/mo (ChatGPT-only, 1×/day) and $99/mo for any four platforms undcuts closed AEO suites like Profound and Peec, and unlimited seats on every plan means headcount growth is free. At $299–$649/mo Elmo competes on sampling frequency rather than brand. Self-hosting is the real price lever: $0 for the software, with the spend moving to your own scraper and LLM API keys.
In short
Elmo — Open-source AI visibility tracking and Answer Engine Optimization for ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews. Best for Marketing and SEO teams tracking how ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews describe their brand, AEO and GEO specialists who want to inspect or modify the scoring code instead of trusting a vendor dashboard, Agencies white-labeling AI visibility reporting for clients with custom branding, domain, and SSO. Free to start; paid plans from $29/mo.
What's new in Elmo
Checked 4 days agoAcross the latest 5 updates: 2 feature updates, 1 launch, 1 changelog entry and 1 news mention.
Elmo v0.4.4: Responses page, billing revamp, brand aliases
Adds a Responses page listing every AI answer for a brand, counts brand aliases as mentions in reports, and reworks the billing page around plan, cost, and usage.
Do AI Crawlers Render JavaScript?
Elmo's analysis of 37,927 journeys finds AI agents that can't read a site's JavaScript recommend it about half as often and get its facts wrong more often.
Elmo v0.4.3: init host URL, timezone and scrape fixes
elmo init now asks for the public URL you'll reach Elmo at, prompt-history timestamps are fixed on non-UTC servers, and the worker reports all missing environment variables at startup.
Elmo v0.4.2 adds SearchApi.io scraper provider
Adds SearchApi.io as a scraper provider for ChatGPT, Perplexity, Copilot, Gemini, Google AI Mode, and Google AI Overview runs.
Elmo v0.4.0 ships external API and MCP server
Adds a full external /api/v1 covering brands, prompts, competitors, reports, analytics, models, tags, and opportunities, plus an MCP server connecting Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, OpenCode, and VS Code with org-scoped read-only or read-write keys.
What people actually say about Elmo — is it worth it?
We scanned public community sources for Elmo on Jul 28, 2026 and could not establish that the discussion we found is about this tool rather than something else sharing its name. Our own analysis of that scan says the posts were off-subject. Rather than publish a sentiment score built on the wrong subject, we publish nothing here and re-run the scan.
Viability Score
How well maintained and how widely used is Elmo? Built from what the vendor actually publishes (docs, changelog, tutorials, integrations, pricing), whether the site is live, and how much real users discuss it. How we calculate this
Last calculated: October 2026
How we score →Key Features
- Track brand mentions across ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, Google AI Mode, Copilot, Grok, DeepSeek, Mistral, and Qwen
- Both scrapes real AI search interfaces and calls LLM APIs directly or via OpenRouter
- Dashboard rollup of current visibility, share of voice, and 30-day trends
- Per-prompt visibility scores with trend lines comparing your brand to competitors
- Share of Voice leaderboard ranking which brands AI engines name most
- Query Fan-Out showing the searches and rewritten prompts behind each AI answer
- Citation analysis by domain and URL with new and dropped source tracking
- Google Shopping breakdown within citation analysis
- Opportunities ranked by impact across pages to refresh, content to create, and third-party sources to pitch
- Prompt management with full-text search, tagging, and an AI-powered prompt wizard
- Responses page listing every AI answer for a brand, searchable by text and filterable by prompt
- Brand alias support — reports count mentions of any name a brand goes by as a brand mention
- Monthly trend analysis and year-over-year visibility comparisons
- Multi-brand support on Cloud Pro (2 brands) and Business (5 brands)
- Self-hostable via Docker Compose with elmo init and elmo upgrade CLI commands
About Elmo
Elmo is an open-source AI visibility and Answer Engine Optimization (AEO/GEO) platform that tracks how AI answer engines talk about your brand. It runs your prompts against the engines buyers actually use — ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, Google AI Mode, Copilot, Grok, DeepSeek, Mistral, and Qwen — then records when you get named, which competitors appear beside you, and which sources each model cites. Elmo both scrapes what real users see in popular AI search tools and captures other models through direct LLM API calls and OpenRouter. The dashboard rolls up visibility, share of voice, and 30-day trends; Visibility breaks down per prompt, model, time range, and tag; Share of Voice ranks your mention share against every competitor; Query Fan-Out shows the searches an engine ran for one prompt; Citations reveals which domains and URLs get cited most and which sources were added or dropped; Opportunities turns all of it into ranked actions — pages to refresh, content to create, third-party sources to pitch. Deployment is the differentiator: every line is open source under MIT, so you can self-host the Docker Compose stack for $0 with unlimited prompts and every model, connect your own PostgreSQL, and verify how each metric is calculated. Elmo Cloud starts at $29/mo with unlimited seats and API/MCP access on every plan. v0.4.0 shipped a full external /api/v1 and an MCP server so agents like Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, and VS Code can query your visibility data directly. Marketing teams, AEO consultancies, and agencies use Elmo to see the gap between what they publish and what AI actually repeats back to buyers. Used by 200+ brands.
Behind the Verdict
Elmo's core claim is that you should not have to trust a black-box dashboard to tell you how visible you are in AI search — so it makes the whole thing auditable. Every line is open source under MIT. You can clone the repo, run `elmo init`, bring your own PostgreSQL, and read the code that computes visibility, share of voice, and citations. No account, no credit card. That is a genuinely different proposition from Profound, Peec, and Otterly, which sell you a hosted dashboard and a methodology you cannot inspect. Strengths. Coverage is broad: scraped engines (ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Google AI Mode, Perplexity, Gemini, Copilot) plus LLM APIs (Qwen, DeepSeek, Mistral, Claude) plus premium grounded models (Claude Sonnet 5 web, GPT-5 Search, Grok web) on Pro and Business. Cloud plans sample up to 4×/day on the platforms you pick, which matters because AI answers are non-deterministic — single daily samples miss volatility. Unlimited seats on every cloud plan and a REST /api/v1 plus an MCP server (shipped in v0.4.0) mean the data lands in your stack and your agents, not in a silo. The tooling itself moves fast: v0.4.4 added a Responses page listing every AI answer for a brand, brand-alias counting in reports, and a billing page that leads with plan, cost, and usage; v0.4.2 added SearchApi.io as a scraper provider; v0.4.3 fixed non-UTC timestamp bugs and made `elmo init` ask for your public URL. The company also publishes original research — an analysis of 37,927 journeys on whether AI crawlers render JavaScript, a reconciliation of AEO-crawler blocking rates, and a write-up of a 72,000-page benchmark on whether AI search engines fact-check claims about brands. Weaknesses. Self-hosting is real infrastructure work: Docker Compose, a CLI, your own AI provider keys, and ongoing attention when scraper providers change interfaces (the DataForSEO switch and the Oxylabs async migration are both in the changelog). Cloud Starter at $29/mo is ChatGPT-only, which is a weak test of a category whose whole premise is cross-engine divergence — one academic audit Elmo covered found Google and Baidu answers share only 3% of cited domains. Premium grounded models are capped at 1×/day and gated to Pro ($299/mo) and Business ($649/mo), and extra prompt/model pairings cost $5/mo each beyond the 20 (Pro) or 30 (Business) included. The product is deliberately narrow: no CRM tie-in, no ad-platform workflows, no content generation or automated outreach — Elmo tells you what to change and leaves the changing to you. Where it fits. AEO consultancies and agencies running multiple brands or white-labeling for clients; SEO teams who want to inspect or modify scoring instead of trusting a vendor; privacy-conscious or regulated teams that need the platform on their own infrastructure; and anyone who wants unlimited prompts and every model without per-seat pricing. Where it does not: teams with zero infrastructure appetite who also need multi-platform tracking on a tight
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Real-world workflow fit
Concrete scenarios for the personas Elmo actually fits — and what changes day-one when you adopt it.
Point Elmo at your site, let the AI-powered prompt wizard suggest the questions buyers ask, and track your brand against the three competitors you care about on ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Perplexity, and Gemini at 4×/day on the $99/mo Basic plan. After two weeks, open Citations to see which domains the engines pull from and Opportunities to get a ranked list of pages to refresh.
Outcome: A named, ranked content plan for AI search instead of hand-typing prompts into ChatGPT every Monday — and trend lines that show whether last quarter's rewrite actually moved mention share.
Self-host the Docker Compose stack for $0, connect your own PostgreSQL, and run separate brands for each client with your own provider keys. Verify the visibility and share-of-voice math in the source code before you defend it in a client deck.
Outcome: Client-ready AI visibility reporting with no per-client software fee, and a methodology you can explain line by line when a client asks how the number was calculated.
Deploy Elmo white-label under your own domain and brand with SSO and multi-client agency dashboards, then pipe the REST API or MCP server into your reporting stack so dashboards update without manual exports.
Outcome: A branded AI visibility product you can sell under your own name, with the data flowing into your existing tooling rather than a vendor portal.
Use Cases
- Monitor your brand's visibility across 10+ AI models automatically, sampled up to 4×/day on the platforms you choose
- See which domains and URLs AI models cite when they mention you, and track which sources were added or dropped
- Compare your AI mention rate against named competitors for specific prompts over weeks and months
- Drill into individual AI responses to see exactly what each model said and which brands it referenced
- Measure the impact of content changes on AI visibility using per-prompt trend lines
- Generate white-label visibility dashboards for agency clients with custom branding and multi-tenancy
- Query your visibility data from Claude Code, Cursor, or VS Code through the MCP server
- Pull brand, prompt, citation, and analytics data into your own stack through the REST API
Models Under the Hood
as of 2026-09-22
Limitations
- Self-hosting is free and open source but requires Docker and CLI familiarity, plus your own infrastructure and AI provider API keys.
- Cloud pricing scales with brands, prompts, and platforms: Starter ($29/mo) tracks ChatGPT only at 1×/day with 1 brand and 50 prompts, and any four-platform tracking starts at Basic ($99/mo).
- Pro ($299/mo) includes 20 premium prompt/model pairings and Business ($649/mo) includes 30; each extra pairing beyond that costs $5/mo.
- Premium grounded models (Claude Sonnet 5 web, GPT-5 Search, Grok web) are sampled once daily and gated to Pro and Business.
- Multi-brand support only exists above $299/mo, so agencies with several clients pay up or run their own instance.
- Elmo is AEO-only by design — no CRM, ad-platform, or campaign automation tie-ins, and no content generation or outreach.
- Self-hosters absorb upstream scraper provider changes themselves (the DataForSEO interface switch and the Oxylabs async migration are both in the changelog).
as of 2026-10-04
Verification history
We have re-verified Elmo 8 times since . Each pass re-reads the vendor's own pages and re-checks every listed field against that evidence; passes where nothing had changed are marked as such.
- — re-verified summary, description, our verdict, our analysis, pricing model, pricing tiers, features, integrations, who it suits, who should skip it
- — re-verified summary, description, our verdict, our analysis, pricing model, pricing tiers, features, integrations, who it suits, who should skip it
- — re-verified summary, description, our verdict, our analysis, pricing model, pricing tiers, features, integrations, who it suits, who should skip it
- — re-verified summary, description, our verdict, our analysis, pricing model, pricing tiers, features, integrations, who it suits, who should skip it
- — re-verified summary, description, our verdict, our analysis, pricing model, pricing tiers, features, integrations, who it suits, who should skip it
- — re-verified summary, description, our verdict, our analysis, pricing model, pricing tiers, features, integrations, who it suits, who should skip it
Showing the 6 most recent of 8 verification passes.
Free to cite with attribution — this page re-verifies continuously.
12-month cost
Project the real annual outlay, including the implied monthly cost when only an annual tier is published.
Vendor list price only. Add-on usage, seat overages, and contract minimums are surfaced under Hidden costs & gotchas.
Plans compared
For each published Elmo tier: who it actually fits, and what it adds vs. the previous tier. Cross-reference the cost calculator above for projected annual outlay.
Self-Hosted
$0/mo
Ideal for
Engineering-adjacent marketing teams, privacy-conscious or regulated orgs, and agencies willing to run their own Docker Compose stack and pay only for their own provider API keys.
What this tier adds
Starting tier — full source code, unlimited prompts, every model at $0, but you supply infrastructure, PostgreSQL, and scraper/LLM API keys.
Cloud Starter
$29/mo ($290/yr)
Ideal for
Solo marketers or small teams testing whether AI visibility tracking is worth it, who mainly care about ChatGPT answers.
What this tier adds
Managed hosting from $29/mo with unlimited seats and API/MCP access, but tracking is ChatGPT-only at 1×/day, 1 brand and 50 prompts.
Cloud Basic
$99/mo ($990/yr)
Ideal for
In-house SEO and content teams who need cross-engine comparison — the first tier where ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Perplexity, Gemini, and Copilot can be tracked together.
What this tier adds
Adds any four platforms sampled 4×/day plus LLM APIs (Qwen, DeepSeek, Mistral, Claude) at 4×/day for $99/mo — no premium grounded models.
Cloud Pro
$299/mo ($2990/yr)
Ideal for
Brands running a real AEO program across two properties, or teams that need cited, grounded answers from premium models for reporting.
What this tier adds
Adds premium grounded LLM APIs (Claude Sonnet 5 web, GPT-5 Search, Grok web) at 1×/day, a second brand, 150 prompts, and 20 included prompt/model pairings.
Cloud Business
$649/mo ($6490/yr)
Ideal for
Multi-brand marketing organizations and agencies with several clients or product lines under one contract.
What this tier adds
Scales to 5 brands, 350 tracked prompts, and 30 included premium prompt/model pairings at $649/mo; extra pairings cost $5/mo each.
White Label
Custom
Ideal for
Agencies and AEO consultancies that want to sell AI visibility tracking under their own brand with multi-client dashboards.
What this tier adds
Adds custom branding, custom domain, SSO, a shared Slack channel, prioritized features, and multi-client agency dashboards on top of Cloud.
Custom / Contract
Custom
Ideal for
Enterprises needing more brands, higher daily sampling rates, or model mixes beyond the published cloud tiers.
What this tier adds
Contract billing with custom prompt limits, additional brands, higher sampling rates, any models, plus optional white label and SSO.
Where the pricing makes sense
The company stage and team size where Elmo's pricing actually pencils out — and where peers do it cheaper.
Cloud entry at $29/mo (ChatGPT-only, 1×/day) and $99/mo for any four platforms undcuts closed AEO suites like Profound and Peec, and unlimited seats on every plan means headcount growth is free. At $299–$649/mo Elmo competes on sampling frequency rather than brand. Self-hosting is the real price lever: $0 for the software, with the spend moving to your own scraper and LLM API keys.
Setup time & first value
How long it actually takes to get something useful out of Elmo — broken out by persona, not the marketing-page minute.
Self-hosters spend roughly an afternoon: install the CLI, run the interactive `elmo init` (v0.4.3 asks for your public URL; v0.4.0 checks Docker first), and connect your own PostgreSQL or use the bundled database. Cloud signup is self-serve and faster — pick a plan, add your brand, and Elmo suggests prompts and competitors immediately; one consultant reports being fully tracked within the hour.
Switching to or from Elmo
How to bring data in from common predecessors and how to get it back out — written for the switcher, not the buyer.
- →From Profound: export your tracked prompts and competitor set, add them as brands and prompts in a self-hosted Elmo instance, and keep your existing reporting cadence at $0 software cost.
- →From Peec or Otterly: recreate your prompt list with Elmo's AI-powered prompt wizard, tag prompts by cluster, and use the 30-day trend view to reconstruct your visibility baseline.
- →From manual spot-checks: point Elmo at your site, accept the suggested buyer prompts and competitors, and let 4×/day sampling replace hand-typed ChatGPT sessions.
- →From a spreadsheet of AI answers: use bulk prompt adding (shipped in v0.2.x) to load your prompt set in one pass, then compare historical notes against Elmo's per-prompt trend lines.
- ↗To a closed AEO suite like Profound: export prompts, competitors, and citation data through the /api/v1 REST API, then rebuild the tracking set in the new dashboard.
- ↗To another open-source or in-house tracker: your self-hosted data already sits in your own PostgreSQL, so point the new tool at the same database or dump it via the API.
- ↗To a spreadsheet workflow: pull brands, prompts, analytics, and citations from the API on a schedule and land them in your BI tool of choice.
- ↗To an agency reporting stack: keep the MCP server connected while you migrate dashboards, so Claude Code or Cursor agents can query visibility data during the transition.
Integrations
Resources & Guides
Tutorials & Learning
YouTube returned 6 videos for “Elmo”, and we withheld 6: 6 could not be judged, because “Elmo” is a single word that other videos use for other things. We are showing none, because we could not prove any of them are about Elmo.
Official links
Tools that pair well with Elmo
Common stack mates teams adopt alongside Elmo, with the specific reason each pairing earns its keep.
findable
AI search visibility monitoring and answer engine optimization for ChatGPT, Google AI Mode, Gemini, Claude, and Perplexity.
Peec AI
AI search analytics that tracks and improves your brand's Visibility, Position, and Sentiment across ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Copilot, and AI Overviews.
SearchInsight AI
Track and analyse how your brand appears, or fails to appear, across ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini, Grok, Copilot and Google AI.
Featured Head-to-Head Comparisons
Elmo vs Chili Piper
Elmo and Chili Piper serve entirely different needs but both are best-in-class in their niches. Elmo is the go-to for monitoring brand visibility across AI answer engines — essential for any AEO strategy — while Chili Piper is a heavyweight for converting inbound B2B traffic into meetings instantly. Choose Elmo if your priority is understanding how AI models cite your brand; choose Chili Piper if you need to book more meetings from website visitors with zero form friction.
Elmo vs Screenplayiq
ScreenplayIQ and Elmo serve entirely different use cases — one predicts box office returns from screenplays, the other tracks brand visibility across AI answer engines. Choose ScreenplayIQ if you're a screenwriter or producer who wants data-driven script feedback and financial forecasts. Choose Elmo if you're a marketer or SEO specialist needing open-source, self-hosted monitoring of how your brand appears across ChatGPT, Perplexity, and other LLMs. There's no overlap, so your decision hinges on whether you're in film or SEO.
Elmo vs Weglot
Elmo and Weglot serve entirely different needs. Choose Elmo if you want to monitor how AI answer engines mention your brand — it's open-source, self-hosted, and packed with AEO features like Share of Voice and citation analysis. Choose Weglot if you need to launch a multilingual website fast with AI translation that keeps your brand tone, especially if you use a popular CMS like WordPress or Shopify. There is no direct overlap; the decision depends on whether your priority is AI visibility tracking or website translation.
Alternatives to Elmo
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findable
AI search visibility monitoring and answer engine optimization for ChatGPT, Google AI Mode, Gemini, Claude, and Perplexity.
Peec AI
AI search analytics that tracks and improves your brand's Visibility, Position, and Sentiment across ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Copilot, and AI Overviews.
SearchInsight AI
Track and analyse how your brand appears, or fails to appear, across ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini, Grok, Copilot and Google AI.
Frequently Asked Questions
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