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Elmo is an open-source AI visibility platform for Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) — an alternative to tools like Profound, Peec, and Otterly that you can self-host for free or run on Elmo Cloud. It tracks how AI answer engines — including ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Perplexity, Gemini, Claude, and Copilot — mention your brand, which competitors appear alongside you, and which sources each model cites.

Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) — also called Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) or LLM Optimization (LLMO) — is the practice of measuring and improving how often AI answer engines mention and cite your brand. Instead of ranking in a list of blue links, the goal is to be the source an AI quotes in its answer. (LLMO is also where Elmo gets its name.)

SEO is about ranking pages in traditional search results, while AEO and GEO are two names for the same newer discipline: getting mentioned and cited inside AI-generated answers from tools like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews. The two overlap, because AI engines run web searches and cite the pages they find, but success is measured differently — by how often and how favorably an AI names your brand, not by your position on a results page. Elmo measures the AEO side, including the web searches AI engines fan a prompt out into and the sources they cite.

Elmo tracks ChatGPT, Google AI Mode, Google AI Overviews, Gemini, Perplexity, Copilot, and Claude, plus models like Grok, Mistral, DeepSeek, and Qwen. Consumer products like ChatGPT and Google AI Mode are scraped from the real interface your customers see, not approximated through an API. For each answer, Elmo records whether your brand appears, which competitors show up alongside it, and which sources the model cites.

Elmo runs a fixed set of prompts across AI engines on a schedule and scores each prompt by how often your brand appears in the answers, from 0 to 100%. It also calculates share of voice — your share of brand mentions versus your competitors — and breaks down which domains and URLs the models cite. Because AI answers vary from run to run, Elmo samples repeatedly and reports trends, not single results.

Add your website to Elmo and its Prompt Wizard generates the questions your buyers are likely to ask ChatGPT, based on your products, competitors, and personas. Elmo then runs those prompts in ChatGPT on a schedule and records every answer: whether your brand was mentioned, which competitors were named, and which sources were cited. Every Elmo Cloud plan includes ChatGPT, starting with the $29/mo Starter plan.

Elmo Cloud starts at $29/mo for the Starter plan, which is 1/3 the price of Profound's equivalent plan. The $99/mo Basic plan gives you 4× the data of Profound's equivalent plan. Pro ($299/mo) and Business ($649/mo) add more brands, more prompts, and premium grounded models, and self-hosting Elmo is free.

Elmo is free and open source to self-host — there is no license fee and no per-seat pricing. You only pay for your own infrastructure and any AI provider API keys you choose to use. If you'd rather not run it yourself, managed Elmo Cloud starts at $29/mo, and white-label plans are available for agencies.