CiteLadder Open-Sources a Self-Hosted AI Search Visibility Tracker

Summary

CiteLadder is an open-source, self-hosted platform for measuring how AI answer engines represent a brand and its competitors. It schedules buyer-question prompts across ChatGPT and Claude and Gemini APIs, ChatGPT Search, the Gemini app and Google AI Overviews through DataForSEO, recording brand mentions, share of voice, rankings, cited URLs and owned citation rates. It also supports perception and fact checks, AI crawler and referral tracking, search-demand integrations, and site-health analysis covering crawlability, structure, evidence, provenance, freshness, internal links and AI crawler access. The platform generates prompts, ranks issues into actionable fixes, and includes an Agent for evidence-grounded workflows, a 46-tool MCP server with confirmation before changes, a scoped public API and exportable reports. Users can connect OpenAI, Anthropic, Google and DataForSEO keys, or use compatible endpoints such as local Ollama servers for some workflows. CiteLadder does not publish to a site or train on user data; crawls and audits run on the user’s machine. Docker Compose is the recommended setup, with Node.js 26+, pnpm 12 and PostgreSQL 16 available as an alternative. The default deployment is bound to localhost, and the project recommends an authenticating reverse proxy before network exposure. It is licensed under AGPLv3, while CiteLadder Cloud provides a hosted alternative with a free trial and team workspaces.