People now ask ChatGPT the questions they once typed into Google: “What is the best tool for this job?”, “Which company should I choose?”, and “What are the alternatives to this product?” If ChatGPT mentions your competitors but leaves out your brand, traditional rank tracking will not show you the problem.
You can check a few questions manually, but that quickly becomes difficult to repeat. A better approach is to save the prompts that matter, run them regularly, and track whether your brand appears in the answers. Elmo provides that workflow in an open-source dashboard you can run on your own infrastructure.
This short tutorial shows how to use Elmo to monitor your brand in ChatGPT.
Is ChatGPT tracking with Elmo really free?
Elmo is free and open source to self-host. There is no software licence fee or per-seat charge for running it yourself. You still need a computer or server, and collecting ChatGPT answers may create usage charges from an API or scraping provider. If you already have suitable infrastructure and provider access, the Elmo software adds no subscription cost.
That distinction matters. “Free” describes the software licence, not unlimited third-party AI queries.
Step 1: Install Elmo
Before starting, make sure you have Docker with Docker Compose, Node.js, and credentials for at least one supported AI provider. A scraping provider is recommended when you want results closer to the live ChatGPT search experience.
Install the Elmo command-line tool:
npm install -g @elmohq/cli
Then start the interactive setup:
elmo init
The wizard asks where to store the configuration, whether to run PostgreSQL in Docker, and which provider you want to use. It creates the environment and Docker Compose files needed for the deployment.
If you did not start the services during setup, run:
elmo compose up -d
Once the containers are healthy, open http://localhost:1515 in your browser. For a server deployment, use the address and port configured for that server.
Step 2: Add your brand and competitors
Create your first brand using its name and website. Add common aliases if customers may use a shortened name, product name, or different spelling. Accurate aliases reduce missed mentions.
Next, add several real competitors. Do not add every company in the market. Start with three to five brands that regularly appear on the same shortlists as yours. Elmo will compare their mentions with your own, making the results more useful than a simple yes-or-no brand check.
Step 3: Create prompts worth tracking
Elmo can analyze your website and suggest keywords, competitors, buyer personas, and prompts. Review those suggestions instead of accepting all of them automatically.
A small, focused prompt set is usually better than hundreds of vague questions. Start with examples such as:
- What are the best tools for [your category]?
- Which [category] platform is best for a small business?
- What are the best alternatives to [competitor]?
- How can I solve [customer problem]?
- Compare [your brand] with [competitor].
Include both broad discovery questions and specific buying questions. Avoid putting your brand name in every prompt. Non-branded questions reveal whether ChatGPT discovers and recommends you without being asked directly.
Step 4: Run ChatGPT tracking
Enable ChatGPT in your provider settings and leave the chosen prompts active. Elmo’s worker runs the prompts on its schedule and stores the responses for analysis.
After results arrive, open the Visibility page. Each prompt shows a visibility score, its recent trend, and the last evaluation time. Select an individual prompt to inspect the complete ChatGPT response, see where your brand appeared, and identify competitors mentioned in the same answer.
Do not panic over one missing mention. Generated answers vary. Look for a pattern across repeated runs and related prompts before changing your strategy.
Step 5: Review the citations
A mention tells you what happened. A citation can help explain why.
Open Elmo’s Citations page to see the domains and individual URLs ChatGPT used while answering your prompts. Separate the results into four groups:
- Pages on your own website
- Competitor pages
- Independent articles and directories
- Community or institutional sources
If the same independent article repeatedly supports answers in your category, study what it covers. Your next action might be improving an owned page, publishing a clearer comparison, or contacting the publisher when your product genuinely belongs in an existing resource.
The goal is not to copy a cited page. It is to understand which facts and sources make an answer possible, then add better evidence to the web.
Step 6: Check progress regularly
Review your important prompts once a week. Look for:
- prompts where your visibility is rising or falling;
- competitors gaining share of voice;
- new sources entering ChatGPT answers;
- citations that have disappeared;
- inaccurate descriptions of your product.
Record when you publish or update content. This gives you a timeline for judging whether the work was followed by a sustained visibility change.
Final takeaway
You do not need an enterprise dashboard to begin tracking ChatGPT. Elmo gives you an open-source way to run prompts, monitor brand and competitor mentions, inspect the full answers, and identify the pages ChatGPT cites.
Start with 15 to 25 useful prompts and a few competitors. Run them consistently, review the evidence behind the scores, and turn citation gaps into specific content or outreach tasks. That simple loop is enough to move from guessing about ChatGPT visibility to measuring it.
