What happens to your traffic when ChatGPT answers a question about your industry and doesn't mention you?
That is the problem Canonry is built to solve. This open-source tool monitors how AI answer engines - ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and local models - cite your website when users ask questions related to your business. You define the keywords you care about, and Canonry queries each AI provider to check whether your domain shows up in the response.
The concept is being called "Answer Engine Optimization" (AEO), and it addresses a real blind spot. Traditional SEO tools track your Google rankings. But as more people get answers directly from AI chatbots, your Google position matters less if the AI never mentions you.
Canonry runs locally with SQLite, so there is no cloud dependency beyond the API keys for whichever AI providers you want to monitor. You can set up scheduled runs via cron, get webhook alerts when your citation status changes (handy for Slack notifications), and compare results across providers and over time through a web dashboard.
The tool supports config-as-code through Kubernetes-style YAML files, which means you can version-control your monitoring setup and track competitors alongside your own domain.
It is very early - the repo launched March 9 with 7 GitHub stars - but the concept fills a gap that no major SEO platform has addressed yet. Install with npm install -g @ainyc/canonry, requires Node.js 20+. Licensed under AGPL-3.0.