An automatic acoustic emission (AE) source location algorithm has been developed for downhole AE measurement of subsurface cracks by using the triaxial hodogram method. The P-wave arrival time is detected by analyzing crosscorrelation coefficients among three components of AE signal energy; the P-wave direction is determined by the method of least squares. For detection of S-wave arrival time, a maximum‐likelihood method analyzes a distribution of instantaneous values of the SH-wave component amplitude. This algorithm can locate an AE source as accurately as human analysis. For field measurements, it takes less than 4 s to locate an AE source using a 16-bit personal computer with a program in C language. Automatic AE source location by the triaxial hodogram method has been realized with this algorithm.