Key takeaways
- ByDefault has no publicly documented export or API for bulk-downloading your historical prompt and citation data, so plan on requesting a manual export from support before you cancel.
- No GEO vendor in this category supports true migration-in of another vendor's historical time series. "Migrating citation history" really means archiving your old data as a snapshot and starting a comparable trendline on the new tool.
- Different platforms collect data differently (real UI sessions vs. simulated prompts vs. panel-based search volume), so even a perfect CSV export won't be apples-to-apples with your new tool's numbers.
- Build a parallel-run period of at least 4-6 weeks where both tools track the same prompt list before you cut over, so you have a bridge between the old baseline and the new one.
- Full-stack platforms like Promptwatch add crawler logs, content generation, and CMS publishing on top of tracking, which is usually the real reason teams outgrow entry-level tools like ByDefault in the first place.
Why teams outgrow ByDefault
ByDefault is one of the cheaper self-serve AI visibility tools out there, starting at $99/month for 50 tracked prompts across four models. It's a reasonable way to dip a toe into GEO. The thing it does well, showing the actual web search queries a model ran before generating an answer, is a genuinely useful content-planning signal, and the company backs it with claims of analyzing over a million AI crawler requests a day for customers like Upstash and Context7.
But here's where it falls apart for teams that get serious about this: ByDefault's model coverage tops out at four engines per plan, picked from a short list (ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Google AI Overviews, plus some coding agents), and Perplexity is still listed as