About Sonde

Like many software companies, we noticed something unsettling: our website traffic was dropping. Not dramatically, but consistently. At the same time, we kept hearing the same story from prospects during sales calls: "I found you through ChatGPT" or "Gemini recommended your product."

The shift was real: instead of Googling, people were asking AI. We needed to understand how our brands appeared in LLM responses. Were we being mentioned? How did we rank against competitors? What was the sentiment?

But when we looked for tools to track this, everything was either quite expensive or locked behind enterprise sales processes.

So, being software people, we built our own.

Building Sonde

Sonde began as a simple internal dashboard to monitor our brand visibility across different AI models. We'd schedule prompts like "What are the best IoT suites for device manufacturers?" and track whether Connhex appeared in the responses, how it ranked and how competitors were doing.

It worked. We could finally see patterns: which models favored us, how web search changed responses and when our SEO efforts actually moved the needle in AI recommendations.

The data was invaluable. More importantly, we had a KPI to optimize instead of guessing.

Why we're sharing it

We're not the only ones facing this shift. Every indie hacker, small software company, agency and solo creator we talk to is grappling with the same reality: the ways people discover products have fundamentally changed.

If this tool was giving us clarity, it could do the same for others like us: the bootstrapped teams of five, the people building products in their spare time, the consultants trying to stand out in a crowded market.

So we decided to open-source it and make it as broadly available as possible. You can self-host Sonde on your own infrastructure, customize it to your needs and never pay us a cent. For those who'd rather trade a small monthly fee for the convenience of a managed service, we offer a hosted version.

We're not an SEO agency promising to "optimize you for AI." We're not selling consulting or strategy services.

We're software people who built a tool we needed, and we're sharing it because we think you need it too.