How to get cited by ChatGPT and other AI search tools

To be eligible for ChatGPT search answers, a site must let OAI-SearchBot read it. Access gives no guarantee of a citation: no assistant publishes a formula, and Google says that for its own AI features the best SEO practices apply and that llms.txt files have no effect.

Facts checked on 6 November 2026.

What counts as a citation?

Three outcomes get mixed up, and each needs its own count.

• A linked citation: the answer shows a link to your page as a source
• A mention: the answer names your brand, with or without a link
• A recommendation: the answer suggests your brand as an option to a buyer

Which robots must be allowed?

OpenAI and Anthropic document separate robots for search and for model training.

Company	Robot	Role
OpenAI	OAI-SearchBot	Surfaces sites in ChatGPT search results
OpenAI	GPTBot	Collects content for model training
OpenAI	ChatGPT-User	Visits a page during a user's request
Anthropic	Claude-SearchBot	Indexes content for search
Anthropic	ClaudeBot	Collects content for model training
Anthropic	Claude-User	Fetches a page during a user's request
Perplexity	PerplexityBot	Builds Perplexity's index
Google	Googlebot	Crawls for Search, which feeds AI Overviews and AI Mode

OpenAI says each setting is independent. A site can appear in ChatGPT search while refusing model training:

User-agent: OAI-SearchBot
Allow: /

User-agent: GPTBot
Disallow: /

OpenAI adds that a change can take about 24 hours to reach search, and that robots.txt rules may not apply to ChatGPT-User, since a person triggers those visits. Anthropic says that disabling Claude-SearchBot or Claude-User may reduce a site's visibility in user-directed web search.

Ask whoever manages your firewall or CDN whether a bot-blocking rule sits in front of the site. Such a rule can refuse these robots whatever robots.txt says. OpenAI publishes the IP addresses of its robots for this purpose.

For Google, make two checks. A page must be indexed and eligible for a snippet. Since 31 August 2026, Search Console also has a control under Settings, Search generative AI, that includes or excludes a site. Inclusion is the default, and a property can inherit the setting of its parent, so confirm that nobody has changed it.

What content should a source page contain?

Google says that unique, useful content will likely influence your presence in AI search "more than any of the other suggestions" in its guide. It contrasts commodity content, such as "7 Tips for First-Time Homebuyers", with expert accounts that go beyond common knowledge.

The research paper that named GEO tested nine ways of rewriting a source, on the 1,000-query test split of a 10,000-query benchmark, with an engine the authors built on GPT-3.5. These are experimental visibility scores, and they do not measure citations won by live websites.

Change to the source	Overall position-adjusted word count
No change	19.3
Quotations added	27.2
Statistics added	25.2
Fluency improved	24.7
Sources cited	24.6
Keyword stuffing	17.7

On the authors' own engine, the effect depended on position among five sources: citing sources raised visibility by 115.1% for the fifth and lowered it by 30.3% for the first. In a separate test of 200 samples on Perplexity, with answers restricted to uploaded sources, quotations raised the overall score from 24.1 to 29.1 and keyword stuffing lowered it to 21.9.

For each page you want cited, we suggest the following.

• Open with the direct answer to the question the page targets
• Add what only you have: your prices, your data, your client cases
• Give each figure with its date and its source
• Name the people who speak, and quote them when they say something useful
• Show the date of the last check

Google warns that separate pages for every variation of a question, made "primarily to manipulate rankings or generative AI responses", break its scaled content abuse policy.

What does the evidence say about third-party mentions?

An Ahrefs study of 75,000 brands, published in May 2025, looked at what goes with brand visibility in Google's AI Overviews. Web mentions of the brand had a correlation of 0.664, against 0.218 for backlinks. The correlations cover the 74% or so of brands with at least one mention in AI Overviews, and well-known brands get mentioned everywhere, so the study does not prove that new mentions bring citations.

Pew and Ahrefs give some figures on Google. In Pew's data, Wikipedia, YouTube and Reddit together made up 15% of sources in AI summaries. Ahrefs found that YouTube accounted for 18.2% of the cited URLs outside Google's top 100 for the same query. These findings say nothing about ChatGPT's preferences.

The useful work here is ordinary marketing: press coverage, talks, comparison articles by independent writers, sector directories, helpful answers in the forums your buyers read. Google says that seeking inauthentic mentions "isn't as helpful as it might seem", and its spam systems apply to AI features.

What can you ignore?

Google lists these under "what you don't need to do". The list covers Google Search.

• llms.txt files. Google Search ignores them, and creating one "will neither harm nor help". The format is a proposal by Jeremy Howard, and other services may read it. We publish one because it takes little effort, and we expect nothing from it in Google
• Chunking content into small pieces for AI. There is no requirement and no ideal page length
• Rewriting for AI. Google's systems understand synonyms, so you do not need every phrasing of a question
• Special structured data. It is not required and no schema.org type is reserved for AI. It stays useful for rich results

OpenAI, Anthropic and Perplexity publish less on how they choose sources, so ask for evidence when someone claims to know. Google adds that no third-party tool has access to its internal ranking or AI systems.

How do you check whether it works?

Start with the official reports.

• Google Search Console. The generative AI performance report shows impressions in AI Overviews and AI Mode, by page, country, date and device. It reached all sites by 31 August 2026. A site with too few impressions will not see it
• Bing Webmaster Tools. The AI Performance report, in public preview since February 2026, shows citation counts for Copilot, Bing AI summaries and some partners
• Your analytics. A segment for chatgpt.com, perplexity.ai, gemini.google.com and copilot.microsoft.com counts the visits attributed to those sites

For ChatGPT and the assistants with no report, we suggest a test set. Choose 20 to 50 questions your buyers ask, run them each month and record the same fields every time.

Field	Example
Question	Best booking software for a small hotel
Date and assistant	3 November 2026, ChatGPT
Web search used	Yes
Brand named	Yes, third of five
Your page linked	No
Pages cited instead	Two comparison articles

Answers vary between runs, so compare several months before drawing a conclusion.

Keep tracking classic rankings as well: Ahrefs found that 37.1% of URLs cited in AI Overviews were among the first ten organic results for the same query.

If you want help, filter the directory by citation tracking or content for AI answers, or describe your project. Our guide on GEO and SEO explains where the two meet, and the one on choosing an agency lists what to ask a provider.

Sources

1. Google Search Central, Optimizing your website for generative AI features, updated 10 July 2026
2. Google, Generative AI performance report and Search generative AI control
3. OpenAI, Overview of OpenAI crawlers
4. Anthropic, How site owners can manage the crawlers
5. Aggarwal et al., GEO: Generative Engine Optimization, KDD 2024, tables 1, 2 and 7
6. Ahrefs, An analysis of AI Overview brand visibility factors, May 2025
7. Ahrefs, 38% of AI Overview citations pull from the top 10, March 2026
8. Pew Research Center, Google users are less likely to click on links when an AI summary appears, July 2025
9. The /llms.txt file, proposal
10. Koozai, Bing Webmaster Tools launches AI Performance reporting, a secondary source