Open-source toolkit lets small businesses track if AI tools cite their websites — no $500/month SaaS required

Ignacio Lopez released AI Visibility Monitor, a free Python toolkit with four scripts that track whether ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, and Gemini cite your website in their answers, plus Google Search Console and Google Analytics integration. No subscription fees — you run it locally and own the JSON output.

The toolkit diagnoses the five technical layers that determine AI visibility: whether AI bots can crawl your site (robots.txt, sitemap checks), whether Claude actually cites you when answering buyer questions (direct API testing), your Google ranking strength, whether AI traffic converts to real visits, and page speed performance. Each script outputs dated JSON snapshots you pipe into your own dashboard.

Solo operators and small consulting practices with 2–10 websites now have visibility into AI citation performance for roughly $1–3 per monthly run (Anthropic API cost only), replacing enterprise tools that start at $300–500 per seat per month — making AEO (AI Engine Optimization) monitoring viable for businesses that previously had no real data on whether buyers could find them via AI.