BrandGEO brandgeo.co

Can AI replace BrandGEO?

Running a fixed battery of brand questions through five model APIs and scoring the answers with a second LLM pass is a genuine weekend build, and for one brand it answers the headline question: what does AI say about us. The gaps are the ones every tracker in this category shares. API answers approximate but do not equal the consumer apps, a score with no trend history behind it is a screenshot rather than a signal, and a rubric only becomes comparable after it has scored many brands.

Verdict: Half-bot · AI gets you partway; the hard part stays hardBuild time: a weekend
Half-bot

01What it costs

$79/moStarter, monthly
$948per year at that price

Checked Aug 10, 2026 · source: brandgeo.co. A free audit across all five engines without a credit card, plus a 7-day trial on paid plans.

02Could AI build it for you?

The core job: Send a fixed set of brand questions through the OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini, xAI, and DeepSeek APIs, score each answer against a six-dimension rubric with a second LLM pass, store every run, render a Markdown or PDF report.

What a working version needs:

  • API keys for OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini, xAI (Grok), and DeepSeek
  • a written scoring rubric with per-dimension definitions
  • durable per-run storage for trend history
  • a scheduler for recurring audits
  • an API budget that scales with prompts x engines

The audit is a weekend script. The trend history, and a report a client will accept, are not.

03What you'd give up

  • white-label PDF reports an agency can hand to a client
  • weekly monitoring that keeps running when nobody is thinking about it
  • a rubric calibrated across many brands, so scores are comparable
  • competitor benchmarks per brand
  • the consumer app surfaces, which no API exactly reproduces

Agencies are the tell: they pay for a report with someone else's methodology behind it that they can white-label and bill for, plus monitoring and trend history someone else keeps alive. A founder auditing one brand once is exactly who the free audit and a DIY script are for.

04Free and cheaper alternatives

Elmoopen-source

A self-hosted AI visibility dashboard that runs your prompts across the major engines and records mentions and citations; the white-label reporting is the part you keep paying for.

elmohq.com →

05The build prompt

Paste this into an AI coding tool (such as Claude, ChatGPT, Lovable or Replit) to build your own version.

prompt.txt
Build me a local AI brand visibility auditor for one brand. Requirements:

- Node 22, TypeScript, better-sqlite3, a CLI. Local only, no accounts, no telemetry.
- brand.json holds my brand name, aliases, domain, one competitor, and up to 25
  audit questions (who is X, best tools for Y, X vs competitor, is X legit).
- `audit run` sends every question through OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini, xAI, and
  DeepSeek APIs. Keys from .env; skip engines whose key is missing and say so in
  the report instead of failing.
- Store one immutable row per run, question, and engine: raw answer, model id,
  latency, error text. Never overwrite a previous run.
- Cap concurrency at 2 per engine and retry twice on 429 and 5xx with backoff.
- A separate scoring pass grades each stored answer 0-10 on six dimensions:
  recognition, knowledge depth, competitive context, sentiment, contextual
  recall, discoverability. Rubric text lives in rubric.md, scores must cite the
  answer sentence that justifies them.
- `audit report` renders a Markdown report: overall score per engine, the
  six-dimension table, competitor mentions, and every flat-out wrong claim the
  models made about the brand, quoted.
- `audit history` prints score per engine across runs from SQLite, so week two
  starts meaning something.
- Out of scope: white-label PDFs, multi-brand management, scheduled monitoring,
  and scraping the consumer web UIs. One brand, run by hand.
- README: setup, per-run cost estimate by engine, and a plain note that API
  answers only approximate what the apps actually show users.

06Open-source starting points

  • Elmo: MIT-licensed self-hosted AEO/GEO tracker, a working reference for the prompt-battery loop
  • llm-brand-tracker: research-grade toolkit for monitoring brand visibility in LLM search, a small starting point
Sponsor slot · openFeatured alternative to BrandGEO. A labeled card for one relevant tool.
Book this spot →

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.