SEO and marketing decision
Lua Rank
A competent developer can reproduce the core automation (audits, LLM article generation, CMS publishing and schema injection) in about a week and maintain it, but the paid product's claimed authority-building, proprietary visibility scoring and full-scale AEO distribution/relationships are not reproduced simply and are the vendor's durable value.
Visit website↗Not priced
No pricing page we fetched carried a figure, so there is nothing to compare against. The build side is still real.
$100one-off38 h to build
$200/mo6 h/mo upkeep
No published price to break even against.
Open-source builds that already do this
Every project below is open source and already does this job today. Fork one, self-host it, or take the parts you need - the build prompt further down assumes an empty file, and this is the shortcut past that. Licences differ; check the one on each card before you ship. All Lua Rank alternatives, with the arithmetic →
What a replacement has to do
- Crawl and audit a website, generate AI-optimized articles, publish articles to target CMS, inject schema/structured data and entity markup, compute and display a visibility score, schedule ongoing content production.
What it still won’t have
- Proprietary distribution/authority relationships with 'top AI training sources' and any opaque reputation signals
- White-label multi-brand agency workflows and account-level features
- Ongoing vendor support, weekly audits and SLA-backed execution
- Any proprietary visibility scoring telemetry and training data the vendor uses
What remains hard
- Product polish and ongoing maintenance
First-year cost
No published price
Lua Rank does not publish a price we could read, so there is nothing to compare against. What building costs is below.
Money you would actually spend
Time you would spend
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What you would spend
What we assumed
The verdict above measures whether you could build it. This one is only about money.
Runnable build prompt
Build an automated AEO prototype: use Next.js for a simple dashboard, Node.js + Express for the backend, Postgres for storage, Redis for job queueing, and host on Vercel (frontend) + Railway (backend/db). Integrate OpenAI-compatible LLM API for content generation and use provider SDK for costs (estimate $200/month). Implement these features in scope: (1) site crawler and technical audit that extracts pages, metadata and produces an initial score; (2) prompt-driven LLM article generator with templates and revision UI; (3) CMS connectors to publish posts to WordPress, Webflow and Ghost via their REST APIs; (4) JSON-LD/schema injection/update for published pages; (5) scheduled worker to run recurring audits and auto-publish pipeline; (6) a dashboard showing visibility metrics and trend charts. Out of scope: training proprietary models, paid placement with AI training sources, enterprise white-label multi-brand billing. Require retries and graceful error handling for API failures, transactional publishing safeguards, basic auth/credential management, and unit + integration tests for crawler, generator pipeline, and publishing connectors.
How we checked
How the score was reached
- Partly verdict base52
- An open-source build was found+5
- 4 cited sources+3
- Evidence score60
The base comes from the verdict. Everything under it is a check that either happened or did not, and each one is a fact frozen in this record rather than a judgement made at render time - so the same evidence always produces the same number.
How scoring works →Cited sources · 4
Every page the run actually retrieved.
- official productLua Rank | AI Visibility Platform for Startups, Businesses, and Agencies
- official pricingBusiness Plan: Autonomous AEO Team for SMBs | Lua Rank
- official docsLuaRank Documentation
- open sourcetowfiqi/serpbear
Integrity checks
What held up, and what did not.
