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. The problem is real, but 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 get presented as deterministic when they are probabilistic, and correlation gets sold as causation.

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 do the opposite. Elmo is open source, so you can read every line of code that generates your data, and our methodology is documented. When we don't know something, or a metric has limitations, we say so.