How to get cited by AI: what you can control.
How to get cited by AI tools starts with access: let their search crawlers reach your pages. Then publish clear, specific, accurate answers that other sites also back up. Google says AI Overviews need no special files or schema, only normal SEO. Nobody can guarantee a citation, so track a fixed list of prompts over time and see what changes.
Reviewed by Anubhav Gupta, Bespoke Devs · Updated
Step one: let the right crawlers in
Blocking a search crawler can stop you from being shown, and it’s an easy mistake to make through a firewall or a CDN setting. Search and training crawlers are separate, so you can allow one and block the other.
| Crawler | Company | What it does | If you block it |
|---|---|---|---|
| OAI-SearchBot | OpenAI | Finds sites for ChatGPT’s search features | OpenAI says your site won’t be shown in ChatGPT search answers |
| GPTBot | OpenAI | Crawls content that may train its models | Signals your content shouldn’t be used for training |
| PerplexityBot | Perplexity | Surfaces and links sites in Perplexity’s results | Perplexity recommends allowing it so you can appear |
| Claude-SearchBot | Anthropic | Crawls to improve search result quality | May reduce your visibility in search results |
| ClaudeBot | Anthropic | Collects content for model development | Excludes future content from training |
| Googlebot | Crawls for Search, including AI Overviews and AI Mode | You lose normal Search as well |
From each company’s own documentation. User-triggered fetchers such as ChatGPT-User and Perplexity-User may not follow robots.txt, according to their docs.
How to get cited by AI: what else you can control
None of this is secret, and most of it is good SEO. See SEO vs AEO vs GEO.
- Answer firstPut a short, direct answer at the top of each page, followed by the detail.
- Use plain factsPrices, limits, dates and names are easier to quote than general claims.
- Make it readable without JavaScriptImportant text should be in the page’s HTML, so that any crawler can read it.
- Cover real questionsUse the words customers use, including comparison questions like “[you] vs [competitor]”.
- Keep it currentShow the date you last checked a fact. Only change that date when you’ve really checked it.
- Earn mentions elsewhereReviews, directories, community threads and other sites’ articles give AI tools more than your own word to go on. If you’re asking how to get mentioned by ChatGPT, this is the part to work on, because other sites need to say something about you.
What Google says
Google is unusually direct on this. Its guidance says “There are no additional requirements to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode, nor other special optimizations necessary.” It also says “You don’t need to create new machine readable files, AI text files, or markup to appear in these features.”
So be careful of anyone selling a special file or schema as the secret to AI search. If you’re wondering about one of the common ones, see does llms.txt work.
How to measure it: a simple prompt check
You can’t learn how to get cited by AI without measuring it. We haven’t published results of our own yet. Here’s the method, which you can run in an afternoon.
- Step 1Write 20 promptsUse questions a buyer would ask, including some that don’t name you. Keep the list fixed.
- Step 2Run them in each toolChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Mode, Claude and any others your buyers use. Use a clean session, and search turned on where you can.
- Step 3Record the resultNote if you were mentioned, if you were linked, which competitors appeared, and which pages got cited.
- Step 4Repeat monthlyAnswers vary from one run to the next, so run each prompt several times and look at trends.
- Step 5Study the winnersRead the pages that get cited for your prompts. What do they state that yours doesn’t?
Where to spend your time
Worth doing
- Checking that crawlers can reach you
- Answering real questions clearly
- Publishing facts nobody else has
- Getting real reviews and mentions
Be sceptical of
- Promised citation counts
- Special AI-only schema or files
- Tools that report one run of a prompt as your “rank”
- Pages rewritten only for AI, and worse for people
Common questions
Make sure OAI-SearchBot can reach your site, then publish clear answers to the questions buyers ask. OpenAI doesn’t publish a recipe beyond that, so measure with a prompt check.
Allow PerplexityBot, which Perplexity recommends if you want to appear in its results. After that, it’s the same work: clear, specific, current pages.
No, and nobody can. These tools choose their sources themselves, and answers change between runs.
No. OpenAI and Anthropic each list separate crawlers for training and search, so you can block training and still allow search.
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