ByDefault alternatives

CiteGraph costs less on paper and measures differently, with questions and runs rather than answer volume. It is worth a look if you want a small, repeatable buyer-question test rather than bulk tracking.

The rest of this comparison covers the ByDefault homepage check, public plan limits, practical page fixes and the measurements to use before choosing a tool.

What are the best ByDefault alternatives for your workload?

Start with the job. If you need to test whether buyer questions produce mentions and citations across several AI engines, a defined question set with repeated runs gives you a focused comparison. If you mainly want a large volume of tracked AI answers and content production, ByDefault's public pricing page presents its plans in those terms.

The products count different things. CiteGraph counts projects, questions, runs, engines, rivals and written pages. ByDefault highlights tracked prompts, models, AI answers and prompt-winning articles.

ByDefault's pricing page lists Starter at €89 a month billed monthly, with one project, 50 tracked prompts, four models and 6,000 AI answers a month. It lists Growth at €219 a month with two projects, 150 prompts, four models, 18,000 AI answers and 5 prompt-winning articles a month, and Scale at €529 a month with five projects, 350 prompts, four models, 42,000 AI answers and 10 prompt-winning articles a month. Billed yearly, the plans are €890, €2,190 and €5,290 a year, and the page also shows dollar prices of $99, $249 and $599 a month. Those figures come from ByDefault's public pricing page, checked on 2 Oct 2026.

The figures describe packaging. They do not establish result quality. Check what counts as a run, how often a question is tested, which answer text you can inspect and whether the cited page helps a buyer.

What does the ByDefault homepage check tell you?

A plain fetch of bydefault.so returns one word, no title and no headline. After the browser runs its JavaScript, the same page shows the headline “Turn AIChatGPTClaudeGeminiGoogleCursorCodexChatGPT into your #1 salesperson.” An AI crawler only ever sees the first version.

We couldn't find a dated, sourced fetch of the ByDefault homepage to cite directly, so treat this as a spot observation rather than one of the 121 scored results below.

For an AI crawler, the issue comes before recommendation. The first fetch needs enough plain text to identify the company, its audience, its product and its offer. A browser can assemble that material after JavaScript runs. A basic fetch may not.

The wider check gives the issue some context. In the 121 sites checked, content was present without JavaScript on 92 sites, failed on 18 and warned on 9. A clear H1 passed on 101 sites, while a plain statement of what a product is, who it is for, its price and its alternative passed on 20.

The chart below shows pass rates for the no-JavaScript and clear-H1 checks across all 121 sites.

Fix the server response before you touch design or copy. The page still needs useful content after that.

Which plan limits can you compare from public pricing?

The table uses figures shown in the public pricing material. The vendors use different units, so these rows support a shortlist rather than a precise value-per-answer calculation.

The CiteGraph pricing page says each plan is paid from the day it starts and can be cancelled at any time.

The same page says a scan on Starter or Growth sends ten buyer questions to four AI engines, three or five times each, through official APIs, while the $19 ChatGPT Only plan asks ChatGPT alone. Repetition matters when one answer may be noise.

ByDefault's Starter plan uses a much larger answer-volume figure. CiteGraph defines its monitoring through questions and repeated runs. Ask what counts as a “run” before comparing €89 to $29.

How should you fix a page that AI engines cannot read?

Put the important answer in the returned HTML: what the product does, who it is for, what it costs or where the price is, and why a buyer would compare it with another product.

Give each question a page that can stand on its own. A comparison page should name the alternatives and explain the differences. A pricing page should show the plan units. A product page should state the use case without making the reader reconstruct it from navigation labels.

ByDefault's pricing page says, “See if you're the recommendation, which sources get cited, and the content you need to win.” That is a clear description of the intended job, attributed to the vendor's own page.

It is still a promise. The quote does not say how many questions are run, how often they are repeated, how cited sources are grouped or whether suggested content changes can be applied to the site. Those points belong in a product test.

Across the 121 sites, questions were answered on the page on 56 sites and warned on 63. Comparison or alternatives pages passed on 54, failed on 21 and warned on 46.

The technical checks remain relevant. AI crawlers were allowed in robots.txt on 116 of the 121 sites, while 5 sites had a failure. Permission to crawl does not guarantee that the returned page contains useful content.

The MCP server workflow can let Claude, Cursor or VS Code read a scan and apply readiness fixes in a repository. The changed page still needs a human check.

What should you measure before choosing a ByDefault competitor?

Measure two outcomes separately. First, does the assistant mention or recommend the product? Second, which pages does it cite when giving the answer?

A brand mention can show recognition without giving the buyer a way to verify the claim. A citation to your domain can show that a page is useful while the product remains outside the shortlist. Combining the two into one score hides which one actually changed: recognition or evidence.

The site's own pages were judged to get cited on 5 of the 121 sites, failed on 11 and warned on 5. That score describes page readiness; it does not report market share.

Before buying, run the same small set of buyer questions through each product. Record the answer text, whether your product is named, whether a rival is named, which domains are cited and whether the cited page answers the question.

Inspect the page behind each citation. It may contain a clear comparison, a direct price, a review or a fact that your own page leaves unstated.

Match the tool to the test. A broad prompt library calls for a prompt-based comparison. A small set of important questions calls for repeated runs and inspectable evidence. A site repair project calls for checks that become concrete code or content changes.

The main caveat: this is based on 121 sites we've audited and one homepage check we haven't formally scored yet, not a scan of every ByDefault page or every buyer question.