About Elmo
Elmo is an open-source answer engine optimization (AEO) platform that tracks how ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Perplexity, Gemini, Claude, and other AI answer engines mention, cite, and describe brands, for marketing teams, agencies, and software companies.
Teams use Elmo for answer engine optimization (AEO), also called generative engine optimization (GEO) or AI SEO: measuring and improving how their brand shows up in AI search.
What Elmo does
AI search visibility tracking
Elmo runs the prompts your buyers ask across ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Google AI Mode, Perplexity, Gemini, Copilot, Claude, and more on a schedule. Each prompt gets a visibility score for how often your brand appears, so you can see where you show up and where you don't.
Citation analysis
Every answer is broken down into the domains and URLs the model cited and the web searches it ran to find them. That shows which pages answer engines trust in your category and where a mention would move your visibility.
Competitor benchmarking
Elmo records which competitors appear alongside you and calculates share of voice across every engine. You see who AI recommends instead of you, and on which questions.
Elmo Cloud
Managed hosting for teams that would rather not run their own infrastructure, from $29/mo. Every plan includes unlimited seats plus REST API and MCP server access.
White-label AEO
Agencies and software companies embed Elmo into their own product or client reporting under their own brand. It gives them AI visibility tracking without building and maintaining the scraping and analysis pipeline themselves.
Off-Site AEO
A done-for-you service that places humanized articles on high-authority sites that AI answer engines already cite. Placements go live within 30 days and continue monthly, with a report mapping each post to the prompt it targets.
What makes Elmo different
Open source and free to self-host
Every line of Elmo's code is public on GitHub, and you can run the whole platform on your own servers for free. Profound, Peec AI, and Otterly.AI are closed-source SaaS, so you can't audit how their numbers are produced or keep running them if you leave.
Public, self-serve pricing from $29/mo
Elmo Cloud plans are listed publicly at $29, $99, $299, and $649 a month, and you can sign up without a sales call. Profound's pricing page lists a free trial and an Enterprise plan quoted by sales.
Month-to-month billing
Elmo Cloud bills month to month with no minimum term, and annual billing is optional (two months free). Many enterprise AEO platforms push you into an annual contract before you can see your data.
Prompts checked 4× a day
From the $99/mo Basic plan, every prompt runs 4 times a day on each platform you track, where Profound checks daily. AI answers vary from run to run, so more samples means trends you can trust instead of one-off snapshots.
Real interfaces, not API approximations
Consumer products like ChatGPT, Google AI Mode, and Perplexity are scraped from the same interface your buyers use. API-only tools measure a different model configuration than the one people actually see.
Unlimited seats, API, and MCP on every plan
Every Elmo Cloud plan includes unlimited team members, the REST API, and an MCP server for Claude Code, Cursor, and other AI assistants. Your whole team and your own tools get the data without per-seat fees or an enterprise upgrade.
Who uses Elmo
- In-house SEO and content marketing teams at B2B SaaS companies extending their SEO strategy to AI search
- E-commerce and DTC brands monitoring product recommendations in ChatGPT and Google AI Overviews
- SEO, AEO, and GEO agencies managing AI visibility for multiple client brands, including white-label reporting
- Software companies embedding AI visibility tracking into their own products
- Developer teams and regulated companies that need to self-host and keep prompts and responses on their own infrastructure
- Local and hospitality businesses checking how AI assistants describe and recommend them
Teams using Elmo include Fermat Commerce, Speakeasy, TradeSites, Record Ranks, AskHotel, AISearch Global, and hundreds of others.
Team
Jared Rhizor was a founding engineer at Airbyte, the open-source data integration platform, where he helped build out its initial platform and connectors. Before that he spent five years at LiveRamp, and was tech lead for the team managing one of the largest device graphs in adtech.
After Airbyte, Jared built and exited two companies of his own: MealByMeal, calorie tracking over text message, and poach.vc, which helped VCs find undiscovered early-stage founders. In July 2025 he started Elmo, after seeing AI search starting to reshape how customers made purchasing decisions. Today Elmo helps hundreds of teams understand and improve how AI answer engines talk about their brands.
Elmo is built by Blue Whale Software, LLC, a San Francisco software company, together with a community of open-source contributors on GitHub. Read more about how we think about AI visibility in our vision.
How Elmo works
Who you work with
You work directly with the team that builds Elmo, not a tiered support queue. Questions about your setup, data, or results are answered by people who know the product inside out.
Communication channels
Live chat on this site and in the app, email at contact@elmohq.com, a booked video call, the Discord community, and GitHub issues. The Off-Site AEO Authority plan adds a shared Slack channel.
Onboarding
Sign up for Elmo Cloud and add your website. The Prompt Wizard suggests the questions your buyers ask based on your products, competitors, and personas, and tracking starts right away. No demo or sales call required.
Turnaround
Self-hosting takes under five minutes with the Elmo CLI. Off-Site AEO placements go live within 30 days of your kickoff call, and new features ship continuously, as you can see in the changelog.
Key facts about Elmo
- Company Name
- Elmo (elmohq.com), built by Blue Whale Software, LLC
- Type
- Open-source AI search visibility platform for answer engine optimization (AEO), generative engine optimization (GEO), and AI SEO
- Founded
- July 2025
- Founder
- Jared Rhizor, previously a founding engineer at Airbyte and tech lead at LiveRamp
- Headquarters
- San Francisco, California, USA
- Website
- www.elmohq.com
- Core Offering
- Tracking how AI answer engines mention, cite, and describe brands, with citation analysis and competitor share of voice
- Pricing
- Free to self-host. Elmo Cloud: Starter $29/mo, Basic $99/mo, Pro $299/mo, Business $649/mo. Off-Site AEO from $1,950/mo. White label and custom plans on request.
- Contract Terms
- Month to month, cancel any time; optional annual billing with two months free
- Services
- AI visibility tracking, citation analysis, competitor benchmarking, managed cloud hosting, white-label AEO, Off-Site AEO content placement, REST API and MCP server
- Communication
- Live chat, email (contact@elmohq.com), video calls, Discord, and GitHub issues
- Notable Users
- Fermat Commerce, Speakeasy, TradeSites, Record Ranks, AskHotel, AISearch Global
- Organizations Served
- 200+
- Open-Source Adoption
- 420 GitHub stars on elmohq/elmo
- Platforms Tracked
- ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Google AI Mode, Gemini, Perplexity, Microsoft Copilot, Claude, Grok, Mistral, DeepSeek, Qwen
- Competitors
- Profound, Peec AI, Otterly.AI, Scrunch, Semrush AI Toolkit
Frequently asked questions
Something we didn't cover? Ask the maintainers directly on Discord.
Who founded Elmo?
Elmo was founded in July 2025 by Jared Rhizor, previously a founding engineer at the open-source data integration platform Airbyte and a tech lead at LiveRamp. He leads Elmo's product and engineering.
Who owns Elmo?
Elmo is built and operated by Blue Whale Software, LLC, a software company headquartered in San Francisco. It provides Elmo Cloud, white-label deployments, and the Off-Site AEO service.
Where is Elmo based?
Elmo is headquartered in San Francisco, California. The product is used by teams worldwide, either on Elmo Cloud or self-hosted on their own infrastructure.
Is Elmo open source?
Yes. The full Elmo platform is open source on GitHub at github.com/elmohq/elmo, and you can self-host it for free. Elmo Cloud runs the same code as a managed service.
Does Elmo require an annual contract?
No. Elmo Cloud is billed month to month and you can cancel any time; annual billing is optional and gets you two months free. Self-hosting needs no contract at all.
Is Elmo an AEO, GEO, or AI SEO tool?
All three. Answer engine optimization (AEO), generative engine optimization (GEO), and AI SEO are different names for the same work: getting your brand mentioned and cited in AI search results from ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, and other answer engines. Elmo measures that visibility so you can track and improve it.
Where does the name Elmo come from?
Elmo comes from LLMO, short for LLM optimization: the practice of improving how large language models like ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini mention and cite your brand. Say LLMO out loud and you get Elmo.
See how AI talks about your brand
Start on Elmo Cloud from $29/mo, or self-host the open-source platform for free.