AEO for Manufacturers
Be the supplier an AI assistant names when an engineer or buyer asks who makes the part they need.
Overview. Your AI visibility and share of voice at a glance.
Used by 200+ brands to optimize their AI visibility
Your buyers are asking AI. Is it naming you?
Industrial buying starts with a specification, not a brand. An engineer describes a requirement — material, tolerance, certification, volume — and asks who can supply it. That question increasingly goes to an assistant, and the answer is a short list of manufacturers assembled from spec sheets and technical documentation.
This favours manufacturers who publish real technical detail. Distributors and marketplaces dominate the transactional queries, but they cannot answer a specification question the way a manufacturer's own documentation can. Published, crawlable specs are the asset here, and most manufacturers keep theirs behind a gated PDF.
Prompts manufacturers should track
- who manufactures [component] with [specification]
- [material] supplier for [application]
- alternatives to [competitor part number]
- what certification is needed for [application]
- ChatGPT
- Claude
- Gemini
- Perplexity
- AI Overviews
Loved by marketers. Recommended by AI.
“It’s a mature, open‑source, self‑hosted AEO/AI visibility tracker.”
ChatGPT
“Simple and much more cost effective than Profound.”
Nolan
Speakeasy
“Elmo is the open-source pick: you self-host it for free and track how every major AI answer engine mentions and cites your brand.”
Claude
“We were looking for an affordable way to track our visibility in AI search, and Elmo was a great fit. They were incredibly responsive and quickly added the integration we needed.”
James W.
TradeSites
“The best open-source alternative to the AI visibility platform Profound is Elmo.”
Gemini
“We're an AEO consultancy, so we turned Elmo on ourselves before any client. It's the tool I trust to tell us the truth about our own AI visibility, and it was tracking within the hour.”
Viveka D.
AISearch Global
“The biggest thing for me is seeing how our brand shows up in ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity and AI Overviews all in one dashboard. Before this I was literally typing prompts by hand to check.”
Borys M.
Backlink Agency
“Elmo has been fantastic to use for tracking AI visibility of my sports management platform RecordRanks. I highly recommend it, I think it's genuinely worth it!”
Deni M.
RecordRanks
“Elmo is the best open-source alternative to Profound for most users.”
Perplexity
The AEO playbook for manufacturers.
What gets a brand named in AI answers in your category, and where Elmo shows you the gaps.
1Publish specifications as HTML, not gated PDFs
A spec sheet locked behind a form or trapped in a scanned PDF is invisible to the crawlers that feed AI answers. The same data as structured on-page content is directly quotable.
2Answer the specification question, not the brand question
Buyers ask who makes a part with given properties. Pages organised by application and specification get cited; pages organised by product family do not.
3Make certifications and compliance explicit
ISO, RoHS, REACH, industry-specific approvals. These are frequently the filter that decides whether a supplier is named at all, and they belong on the product page in plain text.
4Cover cross-reference and substitution queries
'Alternatives to [competitor part]' is high-intent and poorly served. A clear cross-reference table is one of the most citable assets a manufacturer can publish.
Where Elmo fits
Elmo tracks specification and application-level prompts so you can see whether engines name you for the parts you actually make, and which competitors and distributors are being named instead.
From zero to a plan in one afternoon.
No sales call, no bloat. Elmo sets up your tracking and tells you what to change.
1Add your brand
Point Elmo at your site. It suggests the prompts your buyers ask and the competitors to track against.
2See where you stand
Visibility, share of voice, and the sources AI cites, sampled up to 4× daily from the real apps.
3Know what to fix
Opportunities ranked by impact. Elmo keeps you updated, so you always know what to do next.
Every answer engine your buyers use.
Elmo both scrapes what real users see in popular AI search tools and captures all other models with direct API calls and OpenRouter.
- ChatGPT
- Claude
- Gemini
- Perplexity
- AI Overviews
- AI Mode
- Copilot
- Grok
- DeepSeek
- Mistral
- Qwen
- OpenRouter LLMs
Why Teams Switch to Elmo
More Data
Elmo runs every prompt against models 4× daily.
No Bloat
We only do AEO / GEO, but we do it very well.
Unlimited Seats
For your whole team on every plan.
API + MCP
Fit Elmo into your stack and agents.
Open Source
Self host at any time, with no lock-in.
Simple, self-serve pricing.
We recommend Basic for manufacturers: 50 prompts across 4 AI platforms, checked 4× daily, for $99/mo. Unlimited seats on every plan.
- 1 brand, 50 prompts
- ChatGPT only
- Answers checked 1× daily
- No premium models
- 1 brand, 50 prompts
- Any 4 AI platforms
- Answers checked 4× daily
- No premium models
- 2 brands, 150 prompts
- Any 4 AI platforms
- Answers checked 4× daily
- 20 premium prompts 1× daily
- 5 brands, 350 prompts
- Any 4 AI platforms
- Answers checked 4× daily
- 30 premium prompts 1× daily
Self-hosted
The same product on your own servers. Unlimited prompts, every model, full source.
Custom
More brands, custom prompt limits, higher sampling rates, and any models.
White label
Offer AI visibility tracking to your clients under your own brand, domain, and SSO.
Frequently asked questions
Something we didn't cover? Ask the maintainers directly on Discord.
Do B2B industrial buyers use AI search?
Engineers and procurement teams use it heavily for supplier discovery and specification research — the early stages where a shortlist forms. The purchase still runs through established channels, but which suppliers reach the shortlist is increasingly decided by an assistant.
Why do gated PDFs hurt manufacturing AEO?
Because the crawlers behind AI answers cannot get past the form, and often cannot parse scanned documents at all. The technical detail that would make a manufacturer the obvious answer is the exact content most commonly locked away.
Start winning AI search today.
Start tracking your brand in minutes. Plans start at $29/mo.
- Self-serve
- Unlimited seats
- API and MCP access
Want a walkthrough first? Book a 30-minute tour.
Elmo for other industries
- Agencies
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- Financial services
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