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WHAT PEOPLE WANT ep-03: Free AI Visibility, No Subscription

By Juyel Rana · November 10, 2026 · Updated November 10, 2026

Somebody asked ChatGPT for the best accountant in their town last week. Three names came back. One of them got the call. The other two never knew the question was asked.

That's the whole problem in one scene, and it's why a corner of Hacker News has been busy this year. Seven open-source tools for checking your AI search visibility launched there in 2026 — not because developers love building dashboards, but because the paid ones cost real money and small businesses keep asking the same question: am I even in the answer?

The paid tools priced out the people who need them most

Look at what a visibility tracker costs right now. Otterly starts around $29 a month. Peec AI is about $95. Scrunch is $250. AthenaHQ is $295. Semrush's AI visibility add-on runs about $99. For an agency with fifty clients, that's a line item. For a plumber, a dentist, or a one-person SEO freelancer, that's a subscription they stare at and close the tab on.

So people did what they always do when a tool costs too much: they built their own, and they put the code on GitHub.

What the open-source side actually offers

Seven projects, seven different answers to the same question. Here's the honest shape of them, based on a roundup published on DEV in early November 2026 that tracked each launch:

Elmo is the broadest of the bunch. It's a self-hosted platform, MIT licensed, that checks your brand across ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Grok, Perplexity, Copilot, DeepSeek, Mistral, and Google's AI Mode and AI Overviews — nine engines or more. You bring your own API keys, so there's no per-prompt subscription; you pay the model providers whatever the queries cost. It does brand mentions, citations, competitor comparisons, and sentiment. What it won't do is audit your site. It tells you whether you show up, not whether your pages are easy for AI crawlers to read.

Ansvisor is the other full platform in the group. Also open source, also self-hosted, covering ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Claude, Copilot, AI Overviews, and AI Mode, with share-of-voice tracking and competitor citations split out from your own. Same gap as Elmo: tracking, not auditing.

Canonry is a command-line tool for people who like the terminal. It tracks how ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude cite your site, stores everything in SQLite, and cross-references the results with Google Search Console and Analytics. Three engines, but the Search Console link is genuinely useful — it ties what AI says about you to what Google already knows.

Auto-geo is another CLI, installable with npm or Homebrew. Its neat trick is a prompts discover command that reads your homepage and suggests the questions worth tracking, plus a "doctor" command that audits pages for citation readiness. It covers five engines: ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, and Grok.

Lettertrace isn't a product at all — it's a library. MIT licensed, bring-your-own-key, meant to be embedded in your own code. If you're a developer building visibility checks into something bigger, that's the point. If you wanted a dashboard, keep walking.

CiteLadder is the newest of the seven and the thinnest on detail so far. It tracks whether AI search engines cite your site. Worth watching, not yet worth betting a workflow on.

GetCito is the cautionary tale in the list. It's an open-source tool with a genuinely useful idea — a crawlability clinic that checks whether AI bots can reach and parse your content — but its public repo has barely been touched since it launched in late 2025. Free and unmaintained is still unmaintained.

There's also GEO Optimizer, which does the other half of the job: a deterministic site audit across 27 AI crawlers and nine scoring categories, rather than tracking mentions over time. Trackers tell you whether you appear. Auditors tell you whether you can appear. You need both, and the roundup's author makes the point well — a score nobody has tested against real citations is a number, not a metric.

The catch nobody puts in the headline

"Free" here means no subscription. It doesn't mean no cost. Nearly all of these tools work by asking the AI models your questions and reading the answers, and the models charge per query. Elmo's author estimates $5–15 a week in API fees for 50 prompts across nine engines. That's still a fraction of a $95-a-month plan, but it's not zero, and someone has to set it up, keep the keys topped up, and actually read the results. Self-hosting is a trade: money for time and a bit of technical comfort.

That's the honest deal, and it's still a good one for the people asking. A freelancer tracking ten client sites can run weekly checks across the engines that matter for the price of a coffee. A small business owner with one site can check the ten questions their customers actually ask, once a week, and know whether their name comes up.

What to try first

If you're not technical, start with the question, not the tool. Write down the ten questions your customers ask an AI assistant — "best roofer near me," "who fixes boilers in Rajshahi," whatever fits your trade — and ask them yourself in ChatGPT, Gemini, and Google's AI Mode. Free, no setup, and you'll learn more in twenty minutes than a dashboard would tell you in a month.

If you are technical, or you work with someone who is, Elmo is the most complete starting point for tracking, and GEO Optimizer is the most complete starting point for the audit side. Run the audit first. There's no point tracking whether you're cited if your pages can't be read properly in the first place.

And keep the expectation straight. Reddit told its shareholders in late October that it lost more than a million search referrals a week to Google's AI features, and its CEO said plainly that AI Mode "does not drive traffic." The clicks aren't coming back. What these tools sell — the paid ones and the free ones alike — is knowing whether your name is in the room when the decision gets made. The open-source ones just let you find that out without a subscription standing between you and the answer.

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