AI visibility tracking
Track your brand’s visibility across AI responses and compare it over time against competitors.
Elmo
Elmo is an open source AI visibility platform for tracking brand mentions, citations, and competitors across major AI answer engines. It is self-hosted by default, with managed cloud hosting coming soon and white-label options for agencies.
Overview
Elmo is an open source Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) platform for tracking how AI systems mention your brand. It is positioned as a self-hosted alternative to proprietary AI visibility tools, with the data and infrastructure under your control.
The product runs as a Docker Compose stack and periodically queries configured AI models with your prompts. It then tracks mentions, competitors, and cited sources over time, helping teams understand where they appear in AI answers and how that visibility changes.
Core capabilities
Citation analysis
Inspect which domains and URLs are cited by AI models, and break sources down by category such as brand, competitor, and social.
Prompt management
Search, tag, and organize prompts so teams can filter and revisit the queries that matter most.
Competitor tracking
Compare your brand’s mention rate with competitors to spot where they appear more often or own specific prompts.
Response inspection
Drill into individual responses to see which brands were mentioned, what sources were cited, and how the answer was constructed.
White-label deployment
Run the platform under your own brand for multiple clients, with custom branding and multi-org support.
Practical use cases
Brand visibility monitoring
Monitor how often your brand appears in AI-generated answers across multiple models, then review trends over time to see whether visibility is improving or slipping.
Competitive analysis
Compare your brand’s mention rate and cited sources against named competitors to identify where rivals appear more often or dominate specific prompts.
Citation review
Inspect the citations behind AI answers to see which domains and URLs are driving model responses, and whether your own content is being used.
Prompt workflow management
Organize prompts by topic or campaign so marketing and SEO teams can revisit the exact queries they care about and filter results more easily.
Agency reporting
Offer clients an AI visibility product under your own branding, using multi-org support and white-label deployment options.
Pros and Cons
Pros
- Open source and self-hosted, so teams can keep control of their own data and infrastructure.
- Tracks brand mentions, citations, competitors, and trends in one place.
- Supports many major AI answer engines, including ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Grok, Perplexity, Copilot, and Google AI Overviews.
- Includes a free self-hosted option with no license fee or per-seat pricing.
Cons
- Self-hosting requires your own infrastructure and setup.
- Managed cloud hosting is not yet generally available, and is listed as coming soon.
- The public pages provide limited setup detail beyond the CLI and Docker Compose workflow.
FAQ
Is Elmo free to use?
Yes. Elmo is free and open source to self-host, with no license fee or per-seat pricing. You only pay for your own infrastructure and any AI provider API keys you choose to use.
How do you set up Elmo?
Elmo runs as a Docker Compose stack on your own infrastructure. The site says you can install the CLI, run an interactive init, and bring the system up in a couple of commands.
Which AI models does Elmo track?
The source pages describe Elmo tracking ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Grok, Mistral, Perplexity, Copilot, DeepSeek, Google AI Mode, and Google AI Overviews, with support for other models noted on the homepage.
Can agencies white-label Elmo?
Yes. The pricing page says white-label deployments are available for agencies, with custom branding, a custom domain, SSO, a shared Slack channel, and prioritized features.
Is there a hosted version of Elmo?
Managed cloud hosting is listed as coming soon. Until then, the documented option is to self-host Elmo on your own infrastructure.
Quick Facts
- Category
- AI Visibility / AEO
- Deployment
- Self-hosted Docker Compose stack
- Source domain
- elmohq.com
- Pricing
- Free to self-host; cloud coming soon
- Primary users
- Brands, agencies, and teams tracking AI mentions
- Models mentioned
- ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Grok, Perplexity, Copilot, Google AI Overviews
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