What's the cost difference between cloud and self-hosted?
Cloud has a flat monthly subscription that includes everything (AI provider quotas, infrastructure, support). Self-hosted is free in software cost but you pay your own AI provider bills (OpenAI, Gemini, Anthropic) plus Cloro if you use web-engine scraping.
Rough back-of-envelope: a brand tracking 30 prompts daily across 4 AI engines costs ~$5–15/month in API fees, depending on response length and provider mix.
Why don't you scrape ChatGPT/Gemini directly?
For programmable AI engines (OpenAI, Anthropic, Google Gemini API), AnswerixAI uses official APIs — most reliable, well-priced, and TOS-compliant. For web AI engines that don't have public APIs (like ChatGPT.com search results, Google AI Overviews, or Copilot), AnswerixAI uses Cloro as a managed scraping backend. Cloro handles browser fingerprinting, captcha bypass, and rate-limiting at scale.
The Site Audit feature fetches your own pages differently: it tries a direct HTTP request first and falls back to headless Chrome (Browsershot/Puppeteer) when the page needs JavaScript rendering or blocks plain requests. No third-party proxy subscription is required.
Where do prompt volume numbers come from?
Prompt volume analysis pulls keyword volumes from the Google Ads API (Keyword Planner historical metrics), then applies an AI-adoption multiplier (AI_VOLUME_MULTIPLIER, default 15%) to estimate AI search volume. The API itself is free; self-hosters need Google Ads credentials — see the Google Ads API setup guide.
How often does tracking run?
Default schedule is once per day per brand (configurable via DAILY_CRON_SCHEDULE). You can configure per-platform frequency under brand settings (e.g. ChatGPT daily, Perplexity 3x/week, Gemini weekly) to manage AI provider costs.
My visibility score is 0. Did setup go wrong?
Probably not. Brand-new brands or those in non-English-language niches commonly start at 0 across most prompts. The score reflects what AI engines currently cite — closing that gap with content + earned media is exactly what AEO is for.
Can I see the actual AI responses, not just metrics?
Yes. Click any prompt or platform cell on the Insights page; the drill-down sheet shows the full LLM response, parsed citations, sentiment, and detected competitor mentions.
How do I get help?
- Cloud customers: support email in your dashboard footer
- Self-hosted: contact your platform provider or agency
Is my data private?
For self-hosted: 100% on your infrastructure, never leaves your servers. For cloud: standard SaaS privacy — your prompts and responses are stored in a managed PostgreSQL database, isolated per organization, never used for training. Full DPA available on request for enterprise plans.
Does AnswerixAI work for non-English brands?
Yes — 13 languages and 18 regions supported for tracking, and the dashboard itself ships in English, French, Chinese (Simplified), Tamil, and Italian. AI engines respond in the language of the prompt; AnswerixAI's mention/citation parsing is language-agnostic.