Key takeaways
- ByDefault was built primarily as a solo or small-team AI visibility and GEO tool, not as an agency platform, and it shows the moment you try to manage more than two or three client accounts from one login.
- There is no real white-label layer. No custom domain, no branded login screen, no sender-name control on emails. Clients who log in will know exactly what software you're using.
- Multi-client workflows exist but feel bolted on: project switching works, but there's no agency-level dashboard that rolls up visibility scores or citation trends across every client at once.
- Reporting is functional for a single brand's internal use, not for client-facing delivery at scale. Agencies end up exporting data and rebuilding reports in a separate BI tool anyway.
- If white-label, multi-client scale, and agentic content execution matter to you, tools like Promptwatch or agency-specific platforms such as Search Party and Scrunch AI are worth testing before you commit budget to ByDefault for a client roster.
What ByDefault actually is
ByDefault positions itself as an AI visibility and GEO tool: you plug in a brand, it tracks how that brand shows up across ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, and the other usual suspects, and it surfaces some recommendations about what to fix. For a single marketing team watching their own brand, that's a reasonable pitch. The problem starts the moment an agency tries to run it across ten, twenty, or fifty client brands at once, because that's a fundamentally different product requirement, and ByDefault doesn't seem to have been designed around it.
I want to be fair here: nothing about ByDefault is broken. The core tracking works. It pulls prompt data, shows citation-ish signals, and gives you something to screenshot for a client call. But "something to screenshot" and "a reporting system an agency can run on" are two very different bars, and that gap is the entire point of this review.
Multi-client workflows: what works and what doesn't
Agencies live and die by how fast they can onboard a new client, set up tracking, and move on without babysitting the setup. Here's how ByDefault handles that in practice.
Switching between client projects
You can create separate projects per client and switch between them from a dropdown. That part is fine, and it's table stakes for any tool that wants agency business. What's missing is an aggregated view: there's no single screen that shows you "here's visibility across all 30 of my clients, ranked by who's slipping this week." Every single-client monitoring tool that was never built for agencies has this exact gap, and ByDefault is no exception.
Contrast that with purpose-built agency tools. Search Party, for instance, was built specifically around the agency use case from day one.
User permissions and team access
If your agency has account managers who should only see their own clients, and strategists who need access across the whole book of business, you need role-based permissions that scope by project. ByDefault's permission model is shallow. Most agencies end up sharing broader access than they'd like, just because there's no clean way to lock a team member to three specific client projects.
Onboarding time per client
Setting up a new client in ByDefault takes roughly the same steps every time: add the domain, define some prompts, wait for data to populate. There's no bulk import, no templated setup you can clone from a similar client's configuration. For an agency onboarding five clients a month, that's a lot of repeated manual work that a template-based system would eliminate in minutes, not hours.
White-label reporting: the part agencies actually care about
This is where ByDefault runs into the most trouble for an agency buyer, and it's worth being specific about why.
White-label, in the context agencies mean it, is not "export a PDF with your client's name on it." It means the client never sees the vendor's branding anywhere: not on the login page, not in the sender field of an automated email, not in the URL bar. ClicData's own comparison of agency reporting tools puts white-labeling at 15% weight in their scoring model for exactly this reason, and it breaks tools like Power BI and Databox down to a 2 out of 5 because branding control is shallow or requires buying a separate product.
ByDefault doesn't offer any of this. There's no custom domain option, no way to swap the sender name on scheduled emails, and the dashboard itself carries the ByDefault name wherever a client might look. If a client logs into the tool directly, or receives an automated report email, they will know you're reselling a third-party product. For some agencies that's a non-issue. For agencies that position themselves as having proprietary tooling or methodology, it undercuts the pitch.
What reporting looks like day to day
ByDefault generates charts and visibility scores inside its own interface. Useful for internal review, less useful for client delivery. There's no scheduled PDF export with your agency's logo and colors baked in, no branded client portal, and no way to hand a client read-only access that looks like it belongs to you rather than to ByDefault. Agencies that need this level of polish typically end up exporting raw data and rebuilding the report in a separate tool, which defeats a lot of the point of paying for a monitoring platform in the first place.
For comparison, agency-grade reporting tools treat white-labeling as a baseline feature, not an upsell. AgencyAnalytics offers custom domain, logo, colors, and branded mobile apps on its Agency tier. Two Minute Reports markets itself explicitly around "no vendor name, no third-party branding, nothing your client did not expect to see." That's the bar ByDefault would need to clear to be taken seriously as an agency product, and right now it doesn't.
Where ByDefault genuinely holds up
It would be lazy to say ByDefault has no redeeming qualities for agencies, so let's be specific about where it's fine:
- It's cheap relative to enterprise GEO platforms, which matters if you're running a handful of small-retainer clients and don't need deep reporting.
- The underlying AI visibility tracking itself is credible for a quick diagnostic, the kind of thing you'd run once to show a prospect "here's where you stand today."
- It's simple enough that you don't need a dedicated analyst to interpret the output, which is appealing for smaller shops without a data person on staff.
If your agency runs three or four clients and your deliverable is a monthly call rather than a branded dashboard, ByDefault might be enough. The moment your client count or reporting expectations grow past that, you'll feel the ceiling.
How ByDefault compares to agency-built alternatives
| Tool | Multi-client dashboard | White-label branding | Content/action execution | Best fit |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| ByDefault | Project switching only, no rollup view | None | None | Solo marketer or very small client roster |
| Promptwatch | Multiple sites and projects per plan, agency tiers with 10 seats | Dashboard and client portal, scheduled custom reports | Content Agents publish directly to CMS, Unified Actions task list | Agencies that need monitoring and execution in one platform |
| Search Party | Agency-first project structure | Agency branding options | Limited | Agencies focused purely on visibility tracking |
| Scrunch AI | Agency and brand dashboards | Some branding controls | Monitoring-focused, no CMS publishing | Agencies and brands wanting broader monitoring feature sets |
| SEOmonitor | Built around agency forecasting workflows | Client-facing reporting | Not AI-visibility specific | Traditional SEO agencies adding AI visibility on top |
This isn't an exhaustive list, but it covers the shape of the decision. If you're an agency and reporting polish plus scale across dozens of clients matters, ByDefault is going to feel thin compared to any of these.
Why execution matters, not just monitoring
Here's the thing most monitoring tools, ByDefault included, miss: an agency's job isn't to produce a chart showing a client is invisible in ChatGPT. It's to fix that. A tool that stops at "here's your visibility score" leaves the actual work, content gap analysis, rewriting pages, publishing, to a separate workflow and a separate invoice line.
Promptwatch takes a different approach here. Its Content Agents plan, write, and publish GEO-optimized content directly to a client's CMS (Webflow, Framer, WordPress), and Unified Actions turns citation and crawler data into a prioritized to-do list instead of a static dashboard. Monks, an agency whose clients include Netflix and BMW, uses Promptwatch's Answer Gap Report and Visibility Score to actually build content roadmaps for enterprise accounts, not just report on them.
Promptwatch's agency tiers (Kick-off at $199/mo, Growth at $399/mo, Scale at $799/mo) include unlimited projects and prompts with 10 seats, which solves the multi-client access problem that ByDefault leaves unaddressed. It also tracks crawler logs from ChatGPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot and 400+ other bots, something ByDefault doesn't offer at all, and which explains why a client's pages aren't getting cited in the first place rather than just confirming that they aren't.
If you still want to try ByDefault for an agency
A few things worth doing before you commit budget:
- Set up two test client projects and try to get a non-technical account manager to switch between them without confusion. If it's clunky with two, it will be worse with twenty.
- Ask directly whether custom domain and branded email sending are on any roadmap. If support says "not currently," budget for a separate reporting layer.
- Time how long a full client onboarding takes, start to finish, including prompt setup. Multiply by your expected client count per month.
- Check whether the tool's data export is clean enough to feed into a BI tool like ClicData or Looker Studio if you decide to build your own white-label report shell around it.
Bottom line
ByDefault is a competent single-brand AI visibility tool wearing an agency hat it wasn't really tailored for. The multi-client structure is there in a basic form, but there's no agency rollup view, no meaningful permission scoping, and critically, no white-label layer at all. If your agency sells itself on proprietary-feeling tooling and client-facing polish, or if you're managing more than a handful of accounts, you'll outgrow it fast. Agencies serious about AI search visibility at scale are better served by a platform built around multi-client access and branded delivery from the start, and if content execution (not just monitoring) is part of the retainer, Promptwatch's Content Agents and Unified Actions close a gap that ByDefault doesn't even attempt to address. For a broader look at what else is out there, the GEO software directory at bestgeosoftware.com is a reasonable place to keep comparing options before you sign a contract.