Elmo

Elmo is the first open-source, self-hosted AI visibility tracking tool, purpose-built for brands that refuse to be left behind in the AI-first era. It is a command center for understanding how large language models like ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and Perplexity perceive and cite your brand. Instead of guessing how AI search engines or chatbots talk about your products, Elmo gives you hard data: mention rates, citation sources, and competitive benchmarks across every major AI model. This tool is designed for marketing managers, brand strategists, data analysts, and forward-thinking founders who need to move from reactive brand management to proactive AI engine optimization (AEO). The core value proposition is radical transparency and data ownership. Because Elmo is self-hosted and open source, your brand's sensitive visibility data never leaves your infrastructure, eliminating vendor lock-in and ensuring total security. You bring your own API keys for models like GPT-4, Claude, and Grok, or you can scrape web-based AI search results. Elmo then aggregates this data into a sleek, trendsetting dashboard that surfaces real-time visibility scores, citation breakdowns, and competitive rankings. It is the essential toolkit for any brand that wants to not just be seen, but understood, by the AI models that are increasingly shaping consumer decisions.

Dashboard

Your AI visibility command center. This is the first thing you see every morning, and it is designed to give you the full picture at a glance. The dashboard displays your current overall visibility score, trending changes over time, a breakdown of citation categories (brand mentions vs. competitor mentions vs. social sources), and specific cited pages. It transforms raw API responses into a clean, actionable interface where you can immediately spot if your brand's presence is growing, shrinking, or being overshadowed by a competitor in a specific AI model.

Visibility Tracking

Track your brand's visibility across every prompt and every AI model with granular precision. You can filter the data by specific AI model (ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, etc.), by custom time ranges, and by tags you assign to prompts. The system calculates a per-prompt visibility score and displays it alongside trend lines that compare your brand's performance directly against your competitors. This feature allows you to see not just if you are mentioned, but how prominently you appear relative to others in the same conversation.

Citation Analysis

Understand exactly where AI models are getting their information about your brand. This feature breaks down citations by domain and URL, showing you which sources are most frequently referenced by models when they talk about you. It tracks new sources that appear and sources that have dropped off over time, giving you insight into shifting data landscapes. Citations are automatically categorized into groups such as brand-owned, competitor, social media, news, and reviews, allowing you to see which types of content are most influential in shaping AI perceptions.

Competition Benchmarking

See how you stack up against the competition with a clear, ranked leaderboard. This feature compares your brand's AI mention rate against a list of your competitors across all tracked prompts. It highlights who is dominating which specific prompts and identifies critical gaps in your own AI visibility. For example, you can see that your brand is mentioned in 78% of relevant responses while a competitor is at 64%, and then drill down to see exactly which prompts are driving that difference. This turns abstract brand awareness into a measurable, competitive sport.

Proactive AI Search Optimization

Marketing teams can use Elmo to optimize their content strategy for AI search. By tracking which URLs and domains are most cited by models like ChatGPT or Google AI Overviews, a brand can identify which of their blog posts, product pages, or press releases are having the most impact. If a competitor is dominating a key prompt, Elmo reveals the sources they are cited from, allowing you to create better, more authoritative content to fill that gap and increase your own mention rate.

Competitive Intelligence and Market Shifts

Brand strategists can use Elmo to monitor the competitive landscape in real-time. By setting up prompts that compare your brand against key competitors, you can watch how AI model behavior shifts over weeks and months. If a competitor launches a new product or a major news story breaks, Elmo will show you the immediate impact on their AI visibility. This allows you to respond strategically, adjusting your messaging or PR efforts to capitalize on emerging trends or to defend against a competitor's surge.

A/B Testing Content for AI Models

Data analysts can use Elmo to run controlled experiments on how AI models respond to different types of content. By tagging prompts with specific themes or content strategies, you can track whether a new blog post, a Wikipedia update, or a product launch changes how models cite your brand. This turns AI visibility into a measurable KPI, allowing teams to prove the ROI of content investments and refine their approach based on hard data rather than guesswork.

White-Label AEO Agency Services

Agencies and consultancies can use Elmo's white-label pricing tier to offer AI visibility tracking as a managed service to their clients. You can rebrand the entire dashboard with your own logo and domain, manage multiple client accounts, and provide monthly reports showing how your clients' brands are performing across different AI models. This creates a new, high-value service offering for agencies looking to stay ahead of the curve in the AI-driven marketing landscape.

Is Elmo truly free to use and open source?

Yes, the self-hosted version of Elmo is completely free and open source. You pay $0 for the software itself. You will need to run it on your own infrastructure and provide your own API keys for the AI models you want to track. The full source code is available on GitHub, and the community is active in the Discord for support. There is no vendor lock-in, and you have full control over your data.

Which AI models does Elmo support?

Elmo supports a wide and growing range of AI models. It can scrape web-based AI search results from ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Grok, Perplexity, Copilot, DeepSeek, and Google AI Overviews. It also supports API-based tracking for models like GPT-4 and Claude via their official APIs or through OpenRouter. You bring your own keys, and Elmo handles the rest. The team is continuously adding support for new models as they emerge.

How does Elmo handle data privacy and security?

Data privacy is a core feature of Elmo. Because it is self-hosted, all your brand's visibility data, competitive intelligence, and prompt history remain on your own infrastructure. Elmo never sends your data to a third-party cloud service. You control the database, the backups, and the access. This makes it ideal for brands in regulated industries or those with strict data governance policies who cannot use SaaS tools.

Do I need to be a developer to use Elmo?

While Elmo is a developer-friendly tool, it is designed to be accessible to non-technical users once it is set up. The initial installation requires running a few commands in a terminal (npm install -g @elmohq/cli and elmo init). After that, the web-based dashboard is a graphical user interface that any marketer or strategist can use. The documentation is comprehensive, and the Discord community is very helpful for getting started.