OpenSEO and us: two different questions
Updated · Based on published facts
OpenSEO earned its stars. It is an open-source alternative to Semrush and Ahrefs, MIT licensed, with keyword research, rank tracking, backlinks and site audits, and you can self-host it for free or pay by usage instead of a hundred-dollar subscription. It also plugs into your AI agents over MCP. If your job is search-engine SEO and you want to own the stack, it is a serious choice, and we would say so to a client.
It also lists an AI visibility feature, which reviews AI mentions, citations and prompts, and a prompt explorer that compares prompts across the AI models it supports. That is the same ground we stand on, so here is what we do on it, on our published numbers, and nothing about their internals, which we have not measured.
What we measure
We ask all seven AI engines, ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, Grok, DeepSeek and Google AI Overviews, the questions your buyers type, and we keep every answer word for word. A full measure runs up to twelve buyer questions with nineteen answers each, six engines asked three times and majority-voted plus one read of Google AI Overviews, which is up to 228 answers, so one lucky answer proves nothing.
We record which competitors each engine named instead of you, on which question, and how often. That is the moment a buyer chooses, and it is the number an owner asks for first.
Where an engine exposes the web searches it ran before answering, we capture them and keep them with the answer. Read those searches alongside the saved answer to see what the engine searched for.
We check your identity against the government business registry, ABN-verified, and map visibility suburb by suburb, because a plumber in Buderim does not care about national sentiment.
We write the fix rather than recommend one: the schema, the llms.txt and the readiness changes for your entity, ready to publish. Stay Found re-measures every week, scans the web every day for new pages that mention you, and your own AI reads the whole measurement over MCP.
Where OpenSEO is the right tool
Keyword volumes, backlink profiles, rank tracking in classic search results, crawl-scale audits, and a stack you host yourself and pay for by use. We do not do any of that and do not pretend to.
What is open on our side
Our readiness scoring and the audit suite are public at github.com/techhorizonlabs/thl-open, so a developer who likes OpenSEO for being open can check that part of our method the same way. The hosted measurement across the seven engines is a service we run, and we say so. The difference between the two tools is the question each one answers.
Run both
If a client asks "how do we rank", OpenSEO answers it, and it can run on your own server. If they ask "what does AI say when someone asks who to use", that is us, with every answer kept as the receipt. The free scan puts a couple of your buyers' questions to two engines in about sixty seconds, no signup: areyoufoundbyai.com
Tech Horizon Labs · areyoufoundbyai.com · questions to hello@techhorizonlabs.com
Sources: OpenSEO · OpenSEO repository. Checked 9 September 2026.