Key takeaways
- ByDefault (bydefault.so) has no listing on G2, Capterra, or Trustpilot as of October 2026, and no Reddit threads or Product Hunt discussion mention it by name. The "voice of the customer" here is almost entirely vendor marketing and competitor comparison pages.
- Its pricing starts at $99/month for 50 prompts across 4 models and 6,000 AI answers, with no free trial and no free plan, putting it mid-pack against rivals like Peec AI and Otterly.AI.
- The most common switching complaint, raised by competitor Notra, is that ByDefault caps tracked prompts and doesn't include Perplexity as a tracked answer engine, only as crawler-log data.
- The three named customers on its homepage, Upstash, Context7, and Monad Foundation, are all developer-tooling or crypto-adjacent brands, suggesting a narrow early customer base rather than broad market validation.
- If you want a platform with a real public review history and a deeper action layer (content generation, CMS publishing, crawler logs, Reddit/YouTube citation tracking), it's worth comparing ByDefault against more established GEO platforms before committing a budget.
What ByDefault actually is
ByDefault (bydefault.so) positions itself as an "AI Visibility & GEO platform" with the tagline "Become the product ChatGPT and Claude recommend by default." It's aimed squarely at developer-facing and technical companies: track where your brand shows up in AI answers, find the content gaps an AI content agent can fill, publish via a one-click commit or GitHub pull request, then rerun your prompts daily to watch the needle move.
That's a reasonable pitch. The problem, if you're trying to figure out whether it's actually good, is that there's almost nothing from real users to go on. I looked for G2 reviews, Capterra listings, Trustpilot entries, Reddit threads, and Product Hunt launch comments naming ByDefault specifically. None of it exists yet. Competitors in the same category, like Peec AI (4.9/5 on G2) and Otterly AI (4.8/5 on G2), have public review footprints. ByDefault doesn't. That's not necessarily a red flag for a newer tool, but it does mean anyone writing about "what users are saying" about ByDefault in 2026 is really writing about what competitors and affiliate-style roundups are saying about it.
So this guide treats that gap honestly. What follows is based on the only two sources of signal that currently exist: ByDefault's own homepage claims and testimonial, and the handful of vendor-comparison pages (Notra, Semrush-adjacent roundups, SaffronEdge, Get-Ryze, DataAlly) that mention it by name.
The one testimonial that exists
ByDefault's homepage features a quote from Jarrod Watts, Lead AI Engineer at Monad Foundation: "We were completely in the dark about how Monad showed up in AI conversations, and now we have a clear strategy to go forward with and a number to measure it!" That's the entirety of the public, named customer feedback I could find. It's positive, but it's one quote from one customer, on the vendor's own site. Treat it as a case study, not as evidence of broad satisfaction.
Other names on the homepage, Upstash and Context7, are cited as proof points ("10th fastest-growing startup 2026," "62,000+ GitHub stars") rather than attached to direct quotes about the product itself. All three customers sit in the same lane: developer tools, infrastructure, and crypto-adjacent products. If your company is outside that lane, you don't have much to go on for how ByDefault performs for e-commerce, local, or consumer brands.
What the comparison pages reveal about complaints
Since there's no organic complaint thread to quote, the most useful signal comes from how competitors frame their own differentiation against ByDefault, because that tells you what a prospective switcher is likely to run into.
Notra's comparison page is the most detailed. It points out that ByDefault caps the number of tracked prompts per plan and requires picking only 4 of 8 possible answer engines, while Notra offers unlimited tracked prompts and lets you pick exact model versions on every tier. Notra also flags that ByDefault counts citations differently, and that Perplexity is excluded from ByDefault's tracked answer engines entirely, showing up only in its crawler-log analytics rather than as a monitored model. For a brand that cares specifically about Perplexity visibility, that's a real gap.
There's also a methodology difference worth knowing before you buy: ByDefault collects data through "real browser sessions" rather than model APIs combined with live web search, which competitors call out as a limiting factor when it comes to matching what an actual end user sees.
Pricing and plan comparison
| Plan | Price/mo | Prompts | Models tracked | AI answers/mo | Articles included | Free trial |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| ByDefault Starter | $99 | 50 | 4 of 8 | 6,000 | 0 | No |
| ByDefault Growth | $249 | 150 | 4 of 8 | 18,000 | 5 | No |
| ByDefault Scale | $599 | 350 | 4 of 8 | 42,000 | 10 | No |
| Peec AI | from $95 | 50 | 3 (Claude extra) | varies | n/a | Yes |
| Profound Starter | $99 (annual only) | n/a | 1 (ChatGPT only) | n/a | n/a | n/a |
| Otterly | from $29 | n/a | Claude as paid add-on | n/a | n/a | n/a |
| Notra | from $100 | Unlimited | Multiple, exact versions | varies | n/a | n/a |
A few things jump out. ByDefault's entry tier is month-to-month, which beats Profound's annual-only $99 Starter plan that only covers ChatGPT. But ByDefault also doesn't offer any free trial, where Peec AI does. And the absence of a free plan at all (something several competitors in this space, like AthenaHQ, do offer) means there's no low-risk way to test ByDefault before paying.
Why reviews and branded mentions matter more than you'd think
It's worth zooming out here, because the pattern that shows up for ByDefault, limited public reviews but active vendor comparison content, is actually a useful case study in how AI assistants answer "is X good" questions.
Promptwatch's analysis of ChatGPT citations found that reviews make up just 1.7% of all citations overall, but jump to 5.6% (more than 3x their baseline share) specifically for branded prompts, the kind of query someone types when researching "is ByDefault good" or "ByDefault reviews." Social posts follow a similar pattern, rising roughly 4x for branded queries. Product and landing pages still dominate branded citations too, together making up nearly half, with FAQ pages punching above their overall average.
Practically, that means a tool with no review footprint is at a real disadvantage once someone starts asking ChatGPT or AI Overviews about it by name. There's less third-party material for the AI to pull from, so the AI leans harder on the vendor's own landing and FAQ pages, which naturally skew positive. If you're evaluating any GEO tool, including ByDefault, it's worth checking what independent sources even exist before trusting an AI-generated summary of