Can AI replace 100 Questions?
A personal CLI that asks the same questions across four model APIs and compares the answers is weekend-buildable, but matching the product's web-grounded runs, source normalization, failure handling, durable evidence, scoring, and polished reports takes substantially more work.
01What it costs
Checked Jul 31, 2026 · source: 100questionsai.com.
02Could AI build it for you?
The core job: Generate buyer questions, run each through four web-grounded model APIs, detect brand and competitor mentions, collect citations, and render a comparison report.
What a working version needs:
- OpenAI, Anthropic, Google Gemini, and xAI API keys
- provider-specific web search or grounding tools
- durable run storage
- URL and citation normalization
- report generation
The personal core is approachable; production-grade evidence and cross-provider consistency are the hard parts.
03What you'd give up
- reliable orchestration and retries across four providers
- normalized citations and evidence-linked metrics
- competitor and missed-question extraction
- stored point-in-time reports and comparisons
- polished exports and action recommendations
They pay for a repeatable, frozen benchmark with provider failures handled, citations normalized, every metric tied to evidence, and a report that is ready to act on.
04Free and cheaper alternatives
Prompt-by-prompt AI visibility with citations and competitors across the major engines; the queries still need model or scraper credentials.
elmohq.com →05The build prompt
Paste this into an AI coding tool (such as Claude, ChatGPT, Lovable or Replit) to build your own version.
Build me a local AI visibility benchmark for one brand. Requirements: - Use Node 22, TypeScript, official provider SDKs, SQLite, and a CLI. - `benchmark --domain example.com --description "..."` creates one immutable run. - Generate 25 buyer questions from the domain and description, or accept a JSON question file. - Ask the exact same questions through OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini, and xAI. - Use each provider's supported web-search or grounding tool; keys live only in `.env`. - Limit concurrency per provider, retry transient failures, and preserve failed cells in the report. - Store prompts, raw answers, citations, timestamps, model ids, and errors in SQLite. - Detect exact and case-insensitive brand mentions; allow aliases in a config file. - Extract named competitors with one structured LLM pass after all answers are stored. - Normalize citation URLs by hostname, canonical URL, and stripped tracking parameters. - Compute visibility by provider, answer coverage, owned-domain citation rate, and top sources. - Show missed questions where competitors appear but the target brand does not. - Render a self-contained static HTML report with filters and expandable raw evidence. - Export questions, answer metrics, competitors, and citations as CSV files. - Every aggregate metric must link back to the answer rows used to calculate it. - Out of scope: accounts, billing, teams, scheduled monitoring, and recommendation generation. - Include fixture-based tests for mention detection, URL normalization, and metric calculations. - README: setup, provider-specific grounding caveats, estimated API cost, and exact run commands.
App prices, verdicts, alternatives and build prompts are adapted from Can I Vibecode It? (MIT License, © 2026 Rob Hallam). Each price shows the date it was checked and its source. Prices change; confirm on the vendor's site before you decide.
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