Can I vibecode Rankwise?

KINDA · weekend project
price $59/moyou'd save $708/yrbuild time multi-daycategory 📈 seo & marketingreplaced by 0 people

The measurement half is a weekend project. Fire a fixed question set at the ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Perplexity APIs on a schedule, count whether your domain gets named, store every run, and you have the dashboard. What takes Rankwise past that is the acting half: ranking topics by demand and citation gap, drafting sourced articles, and publishing them into WordPress, Shopify, Webflow or Wix without breaking anything. You can hand-write that loop for one site and one CMS. Doing it across four engines and four CMSes, every week, while the APIs move under you, is the part that stays a product.

the prompt
Build me a local AI answer engine citation tracker for one website. Requirements:

- Node 22, TypeScript, SQLite via better-sqlite3, a CLI plus a server-rendered dashboard
  on localhost. No accounts, no telemetry, everything stays on my machine except the
  API calls.
- site.json holds my domain, brand aliases and competitor domains. questions.json holds
  up to 40 buyer questions I want to be the answer to.
- `rank run` sends every question through OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini and Perplexity with
  each provider's web search or grounding tool on. Keys live in .env.
- Write one immutable row per run, question and provider: raw answer, cited URLs, model
  id and any error. Never overwrite a previous run, history is the whole point.
- Cap concurrency at 3 per provider, retry twice on 429 and 5xx with backoff, and show
  failed cells in the report rather than dropping them silently.
- Normalize every citation to hostname plus canonical path, strip tracking params, then
  compute my citation share and a top 25 cited domains table per engine.
- `rank serve` renders citation rate per engine over time, the questions where a
  competitor is cited and I am not, and a week-over-week diff.
- `rank audit <url>` fetches one page and reports the mechanical gaps only: missing or
  invalid JSON-LD, missing canonical, robots and llms.txt rules blocking AI crawlers,
  and thin heading structure. Print the JSON-LD block it would add.
- `rank export` writes runs and citations to CSV.
- Out of scope: writing articles, publishing to a CMS, and scraping the consumer chat
  UIs. Use the APIs only.
- README: setup, per-run cost estimate, a cron line for the weekly run, and a plain note
  that API answers only approximate what users are actually shown.

$ open in your agent (prompt prefilled, you press enter) or copy it raw

why people still pay

Because measuring the gap is the easy half and closing it is the work. A personal script tells you Perplexity never mentions you. It does not decide which of forty questions is winnable, write a sourced article, get it live in your CMS, and then prove which citation that article won. The accumulated score history matters too: the number is meaningless in week one and load-bearing in month six, and starting over resets you to zero.

what you lose

xthe CMS publishing matrix, and the upkeep as WordPress, Shopify, Webflow and Wix each change their APIs

xthe editorial layer: topics ranked by demand, citation gap and winnability, then drafted and reviewed rather than dumped

xexact technical diffs (JSON-LD, canonicals, robots rules, llms.txt) instead of generic advice you still have to translate

xmonths of score history, without which a single week's citation rate tells you nothing

xper-engine weekly scoring across seven on-page dimensions, which costs real API spend every run

share on X ↗"I just replaced Rankwise ($59/mo) with one prompt"
the escape hatch

Don't feel like building it? These folks already made it free.

ElmoTracks the citations honestly. Writing the article and pushing it to your CMS is still your evening.231aug 2026open source

no votes, no pay-to-list · just what's real

the numbers

Rankwise pricing

starter$59/mo · monthly · $708/yr

free tierAfter the trial the account drops to a free plan that keeps monitoring 1 domain and 10 tracked questions against Perplexity, re-checked weekly, with the score history intact. Writing and publishing articles need a paid plan.

verified 2026-08-10 · source ↗

questions
Is Rankwise free?

After the trial the account drops to a free plan that keeps monitoring 1 domain and 10 tracked questions against Perplexity, re-checked weekly, with the score history intact. Writing and publishing articles need a paid plan. Paid is Starter at $59/mo (checked 2026-08-10).

Can I vibecode Rankwise?

Kinda. The core of Rankwise is buildable in a weekend with the prompt on this page, but there are real gaps: the CMS publishing matrix, and the upkeep as WordPress, Shopify, Webflow and Wix each change their APIs, the editorial layer: topics ranked by demand, citation gap and winnability, then drafted and reviewed rather than dumped. Read the honest list above before committing.

How much does Rankwise cost?

Rankwise costs about $59/month (Starter, checked 2026-08-10), which is $708 per year.

What do I lose by replacing Rankwise?

Honestly: the CMS publishing matrix, and the upkeep as WordPress, Shopify, Webflow and Wix each change their APIs; the editorial layer: topics ranked by demand, citation gap and winnability, then drafted and reviewed rather than dumped; exact technical diffs (JSON-LD, canonicals, robots rules, llms.txt) instead of generic advice you still have to translate; months of score history, without which a single week's citation rate tells you nothing; per-engine weekly scoring across seven on-page dimensions, which costs real API spend every run. If any of those are load-bearing for you, keep paying.

Is there an open-source alternative to Rankwise?

Yes: Elmo (Tracks the citations honestly. Writing the article and pushing it to your CMS is still your evening.) The prompt is for when you want it exactly your way.

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