AI visibility monitoring should be a commodity, not a luxury.

A wave of VC-funded startups has flooded the "AI Engine Optimization" space, charging premium prices for what amounts to running queries against LLM APIs and tracking the results. Many of these companies will fail — not because the problem isn't real, but because their cost structures require enterprise pricing for commodity work.

There's also a real possibility that LLM providers themselves start offering brand visibility data directly. When that happens, many of these platforms lose their reason to exist. We're building with that future in mind — if providers open up, we'll shift to aggregating their data rather than collecting our own.

Meanwhile, the AEO space is rife with misinformation. Consultants sell "optimization" services based on flawed assumptions about how LLMs work. Rankings are presented as deterministic when they're probabilistic. Correlation is sold as causation. We believe this hurts everyone.

Too much of the AEO industry operates like a black box. Vendors show you scores and rankings without explaining how they're calculated, then charge you to improve numbers you can't independently verify.

We take the opposite approach. Elmo is open source — you can read every line of code that generates your data. Our methodology is documented. When we don't know something, we say so. When a metric has limitations, we explain what they are.