How do I get cited by ChatGPT, Perplexity, and AI Overviews?
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Ranking #1 on Google and being the source an AI quotes are two different wins. When someone asks ChatGPT or Perplexity a question, the engine reads a few pages, writes one answer, and names a couple of sources. If you’re not one of the pages it reads, you’re not in the answer, no matter where you rank. Here’s how to be one of them.
1. Let the citation bots in (the step everyone misses)
AI search engines crawl with their own named agents to fetch pages while answering a question. The big ones right now:
OAI-SearchBot: ChatGPT search.PerplexityBot: Perplexity.Google-Extended: Google’s AI features, including AI Overviews.
Plenty of sites block these by accident: a copied robots.txt, a security plugin’s default, an overzealous firewall. If a citation bot can’t reach you, you cannot be cited. Period. Open your robots.txt and make sure you aren’t disallowing them.
2. What’s the difference between training bots and citation bots?
This trips people up. There are two separate kinds of AI crawler:
- Training bots (
GPTBot,CCBot) collect text to train future models. Blocking them keeps your content out of training data, a reasonable choice for some. - Citation bots (above) fetch your page live to answer someone’s question right now.
You can block training and still allow citation. What you must not do is block the citation bots and expect to show up in answers. Decide each separately and on purpose.
3. Ship an llms.txt
An emerging standard: a short markdown file at yourdomain.com/llms.txt that maps your most important pages for language models, cleanly, without the navigation and ad clutter of a normal page. Think of it as a sitemap written for AI. It’s low-cost, and almost nobody in most niches has one yet, which is exactly when being early pays.
4. Write in a quotable shape
AI reproduces structure. Make your content easy to lift:
- Answer first. Put the direct answer in the first sentence under a heading, then explain. Engines pull the clean, self-contained answer, not the one buried in paragraph four.
- Question-style headings. People ask AI in questions. A heading phrased the way they ask (“How long does AdSense approval take?”) matches the prompt and gets pulled in. A clever-but-vague heading doesn’t.
- Structured data. Article schema, plus clear question/answer and step-by-step blocks written into the page, hand the engine content in the format it reproduces. Google dropped FAQ and HowTo rich results, so put the Q&A in the HTML, not just the markup.
- Facts it can stand behind. Specific, checkable statements (numbers, steps, definitions) get quoted. Vague marketing copy doesn’t.
5. Build presence off your own site
AI engines weigh what the rest of the web says about you, not just your homepage. Reviews, forum and Reddit threads, mentions in articles, and a consistent name, address, and details everywhere all add up to “this source is real.” You can’t fake this, but you can be consistent and earn it.
6. Test whether it actually worked
The real measure isn’t a rank checker, it’s the engines themselves. Open ChatGPT (with search on), Perplexity, and Google’s AI Overviews and ask the genuine question a customer would ask in your category. Are you named? Which page got cited? Did it describe you accurately? That live test tells you more than any score, and it shows you exactly which page is doing the work.
The honest version
GEO sits on top of SEO, it doesn’t replace it. A page has to be crawlable, real, and well-structured before any of this matters. Do the foundation, then add the AI layer: open the citation bots, ship an llms.txt, answer first, mark it up. None of it is exotic. Most sites just haven’t done it yet.
Quick answers
Training bots vs citation bots? Training bots feed future models; citation bots fetch you live to answer a question. Allow the citation bots to be quoted.
How do I test it? Ask ChatGPT, Perplexity, and AI Overviews the real question and see if you’re named and cited.
Does schema help? Article schema helps, and so does clean question/answer and step structure in your HTML. Google no longer shows FAQ or HowTo rich results, so the win is the page structure, not the markup badge.
Check your AI readiness with GreenLight
GreenLight’s AI Search (GEO) check looks for exactly these signals: whether the AI citation bots can reach you, whether you have an llms.txt, whether your content carries structured data and question-style headings, and it gives you the page and the fix for each gap, in plain language.