Why your brand may be missing in AI answers and how to fix it

The shift from search engines to AI-powered assistants is reshaping how users discover products. If someone asks an AI like ChatGPT or Perplexity for recommendations, will your brand even appear in the answer? Most founders have no way of knowing—until now. A recently released open-source command-line interface (CLI) called aeo-platform is designed to measure exactly that, providing hard data on your brand’s presence in AI responses and offering clear next steps to improve visibility.

A tool built for the AI answer engine era

AEO, or Answer Engine Optimization, is emerging as the natural evolution of traditional SEO. Unlike search engine rankings, AEO focuses on getting cited within AI-generated answers rather than securing a spot on a search results page. The aeo-platform CLI provides an automated way to track how often your brand is mentioned—and cited—in AI responses, all running locally on your machine with no external dependencies.

The tool is MIT-licensed, meaning it’s free to use and modify, and it requires no runtime dependencies. Installation takes less than a second, and the entire process runs offline, writing all data to local files. This ensures no data is sent to external dashboards, giving users full control over their information.

How to measure your AI visibility in minutes

Getting started with aeo-platform is straightforward. The process involves three core commands:

npm install -g aeo-platform
export OPENAI_API_KEY="sk-proj-..."
export GEMINI_API_KEY="AIzaSy..."
aeo-platform init --yes --brand=YOURBRAND --domain=YOURDOMAIN.COM --auto
aeo-platform run
aeo-platform report

The init command automatically detects your brand category and generates three commercial buyer queries tailored to your domain. The run command sends these queries to multiple AI engines—including ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, and Perplexity—and scores the results based on visibility metrics. Finally, report generates a detailed HTML report that opens in your browser, summarizing your brand’s presence across all queries and engines.

No scraping is involved; the tool uses official REST APIs to ensure accuracy and compliance. OpenAI and Gemini API keys are required, while Anthropic and Perplexity keys are optional and enhance the report with additional columns. All data is stored locally under aeo-responses/YYYY-MM-DD/, making it easy to track progress over time.

What the visibility score actually measures

The tool evaluates your brand’s presence using a Unified Visibility Index (UVI), a weighted score (0–100) that combines four key signals:

• Presence (35%): Whether your brand appears in the AI’s answer.
• Sentiment (25%): The tone of the mention (positive, neutral, negative).
• Rank (20%): Your brand’s position relative to competitors in the answer.
• Citation (20%): Whether your brand is cited from your own website.

If a signal lacks data in a given run, its weight is redistributed among the remaining signals to avoid artificial values. The tool also includes a crawlability audit, checking if major AI bots like GPTBot, ClaudeBot, and PerplexityBot are allowed to access your site. Additionally, it assesses off-page authority signals from platforms like Wikipedia, Reddit, GitHub, and Wikidata.

The CLI is designed with continuous integration (CI) in mind, offering exit codes to trigger alerts when visibility drops or all checks return zero mentions.

From data to action: turning insights into strategy

While many AI visibility tools stop at reporting where your brand is missing, aeo-platform goes further by generating a ready-to-use action plan. After each run, the tool exports a JSON file containing visibility metrics, citation gaps, competitor mentions, and crawlability data. Users can then paste this JSON into their existing AI assistant subscription—such as ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini—to receive a 30-step improvement plan tailored to their specific gaps.

This approach avoids the pitfalls of traditional dashboards, which often overwhelm users with raw data without guiding them on next steps. By leveraging the user’s own AI subscription, the tool ensures the plan is actionable and aligned with their existing workflows. Open-source tools like aeo-platform thrive on this model, as they empower users to take control rather than lock them into a proprietary interface.

Real results: how one product turned visibility around

To demonstrate its effectiveness, the aeo-platform team tested the tool on their own product, TypelessForm, a voice-to-form widget. Over four weeks, they tracked visibility using three buyer queries like "best voice form filling tools 2026". The results were eye-opening.

At the start, the product had a 33% presence rate across twelve checks (four engines × three queries). The data revealed a critical asymmetry: one engine returned zero mentions across all queries, while another was within striking distance. This level of detail is impossible to capture with a single composite score, making it clear where to focus efforts.

The AI-generated action plan prioritized a structural fix: adding concise answer capsules (40–60 words) under every H2 heading that lacked one. Since AI engines pull from these sections, a single update could improve extractability across all engines simultaneously. The plan also identified AnveVoice as a key competitor, with five mentions compared to TypelessForm’s seven, and advised against spending time on crawlability or schema improvements—those were already optimized.

After implementation, the results spoke for themselves. By May 25, 2026, the overall presence rate jumped to 58%, and the Unified Visibility Index rose to 65/100. Gemini’s hit rate improved from 1 out of 3 queries to 3 out of 3, while Claude’s hit rate went from 1 out of 3 to 2 out of 3.

These gains weren’t the result of guesswork but of data-driven decisions. The tool’s ability to pinpoint exactly where to improve—and what to ignore—demonstrates the power of AEO when paired with actionable insights.

As AI assistants continue to dominate user discovery, brands must adapt or risk falling behind. Tools like aeo-platform provide the clarity needed to stay visible in this new landscape, ensuring your product isn’t just another name lost in the noise.