Show HN: CiteLadder – open-source AI search visibility tracker

Open-source AI search visibility (GEO / AEO) you can self-host.

See how ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude and Google AI Overviews answer your buyers' questions, which brands they name, and which pages they cite. Then find out why, fix it, and measure whether it worked.

Quick start · Features · Screenshots · MCP · Hosted version · Docs · Contributing

Don't want to run it yourself? CiteLadder Cloud is the hosted version with a free trial, team workspaces and managed engine access. Product guides live at docs.citeladder.com.

For a portfolio of real buyer questions (prompts), CiteLadder asks the answer engines on a schedule and records every answer:

• Which answer engines : ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini through their APIs, plus ChatGPT Search, the Gemini app andGoogle AI Overviews through DataForSEO.
• Which brands they name : your brand and your competitors, with visibility, share of voice, rank and how each one changes between comparable runs.
• Which pages they cite : cited and retrieved domains and URLs, your owned citation rate, source types, and which publishers show up next to your competitors.
• What they get wrong : perception and fact checks against your own site's claims.
• Why : your site's crawlability and structure for AI (Site Health), the demand behind each question (Search Console, GA4, Bing), and which AI crawlers and referrals actually reach you.

The measured outcome is observed mention and citation share, compared under the same prompts and engines over time. Site and demand metrics are leading indicators, never presented as proof of cause. unavailable, not configured and observed zero stay three different things.

CiteLadder never publishes anything to your site for you and never trains on your data. You bring your own model and data-provider keys, and every crawl and audit runs on your machine.

You need Docker with Compose v2.

git clone https://github.com/abhij1306/CiteLadder.git
cd CiteLadder
docker compose up -d --build

Open http://localhost:8100. The first start builds the image, which takes a few minutes, then applies the database schema and creates your workspace. There is no sign-up and no login.

Then:

1. Create a project. Enter your website; CiteLadder researches the brand and proposes competitors and an ideal customer profile for you to confirm.
2. Add model keys inSettings → Providers (OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, DataForSEO) to run AI Visibility audits.
3. Run Site Health to crawl and analyse your site; it needs no keys.
4. Optionally connect Search Console, GA4 or Bing in Settings → Integrations (seeGoogle and Microsoft sign-in ).

To use the Agent, brand research and prompt generation, set an LLM in .env (see below) and run docker compose up -d again.

docker compose logs -f app      # follow the logs
docker compose down             # stop (data is kept in Docker volumes)
docker compose down -v          # stop and delete all data

You need Node.js 26+, pnpm 12 (corepack enable) and a PostgreSQL 16 database.

git clone https://github.com/abhij1306/CiteLadder.git
cd CiteLadder
pnpm bootstrap && pnpm build
DATABASE_URL=postgresql://user:password@localhost:5432/citeladder pnpm start

pnpm start applies migrations, creates the workspace, serves the app on http://localhost:8100 and runs background jobs. Settings come from the environment or a .env file in the repository root. Generated instance secrets are stored in .data/.

Everything is optional. Copy the template and fill in what you need:

cp .env.example .env

Answer-engine and DataForSEO keys are entered in the app (Settings → Providers) and stored encrypted in the database. The encryption key and other instance secrets are generated on first start and kept in the citeladder_data volume (or .data/ without Docker): back them up together with the database.

Create an OAuth client in your own Google Cloud (or Azure) project, add the redirect URI shown in Settings → Integrations, and put the client ID and secret in .env. Without them the integrations show as not configured, and everything else keeps working.

Set MCP_TOKEN in .env to a long random string and restart. Then, for example in Claude Code:

claude mcp add --transport http citeladder http://localhost:8100/mcp \
  --header "Authorization: Bearer <MCP_TOKEN>"

Settings → MCP in the app shows the URL and a JSON snippet for other clients. The bundled agent plugin adds review skills (AI visibility review, change review, technical SEO triage).

CiteLadder is a single-workspace, self-hosted tool with no login. The Compose file binds the app to 127.0.0.1 only. Before you expose it to a network, put an authenticating reverse proxy in front of it. The API also answers only to localhost and the host in PUBLIC_APP_ORIGIN; list any other host name you use in ALLOWED_HOSTS. See SECURITY.md for more, and for how to report vulnerabilities.

browser app (React + Vite SPA) ─┐
MCP clients ────────────────────┼─▶ API (Node 26, Hono) ─▶ PostgreSQL 16 (data + job queue)
public API (/v1) ───────────────┘          ▲
                                           │
                              runner (crawls, audits, syncs, schedules)

Contributions are welcome. See CONTRIBUTING.md for local development, checks and the PR process, and the Code of Conduct.

GNU Affero General Public License v3.0. If you run a modified version as a network service, you must offer its source to your users.