I built an open-source CLI that tells you if ChatGPT cites your brand — and what to do about it

Your users have started asking ChatGPT and Perplexity instead of Google. So here is the uncomfortable question: when someone asks an AI engine "what is the best tool for <your category> ", does your product show up in the answer? Most founders have no idea. I didn't either, until I measured it — and the gap was nowhere near where I expected. So we built a CLI to measure it. It's called aeo-platform , it's MIT-licensed, it has zero runtime dependencies, and it runs entirely on your machine. This post is the five-minute version: install it, point it at your domain, and read the gap. I'll show you the exact commands and the real before/after numbers from running it on one of our own products. Quick framing on terms: AEO (answer engine optimization) is just SEO's younger sibling for AI answers — getting cited inside the AI's response instead of ranking on a SERP. Some people call it GEO. Same field. TL;DR — three commands npm install -g aeo-platform export OPENAI_API_KEY = "sk-proj-..." # required export GEMINI_API_KEY = "AIzaSy..." # required aeo-platform init --yes --brand = YOURBRAND --domain = YOURDOMAIN.COM --auto \ && aeo-platform run \ && aeo-platform report init auto-discovers your category and writes three commercial buyer queries to a local .aeo-tracker.json . run fires those queries at each engine and scores the answers. report opens a single-file HTML report in your browser. The whole thing installs in under a second (no dependency tree to resolve) and writes everything to disk under aeo-responses/YYYY-MM-DD/ — nothing is sent to a hosted dashboard. OpenAI and Gemini keys are mandatory (they also power a two-model cross-check that filters hallucinated brand mentions). Anthropic and Perplexity keys are optional — each one just adds a column to the report. What it actually measures A single run sends your buyer queries to four engines through their official REST APIs — no scraping, no proprietary black-box score: Engine Model Type ChatGPT (OpenAI) gpt-5-search