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.
01What it costs
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
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.
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
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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