How to get your site cited by AI answer engines

1. Let every answer engine fetch you

Each engine has its own crawler: OAI-SearchBot and GPTBot (ChatGPT), PerplexityBot (Perplexity), ClaudeBot (Claude), and Googlebot plus the Google-Extended token (Gemini and AI Overviews). Check that robots.txt and your CDN don't block them. The free check shows what each one sees.

2. Put the answer first

Answer engines quote short passages that stand on their own. Under each H2, give a direct one or two sentence answer before the detail.

3. Make claims citable

Numbers, dates, named sources and first-hand data get footnoted. Marketing adjectives don't.

4. Add structured data

Organization, Product, Article and FAQPage JSON-LD make the facts machine-readable. Use the llms.txt generator to give models a map of your best URLs.

5. Keep pages fast and crawlable

Server-render the main content, keep a clean sitemap, and avoid gating answers behind JavaScript or logins.

6. Earn mentions off-site

Perplexity and ChatGPT lean on sources that are already referenced across the web: directories, reviews, comparisons and community threads.

7. Measure one page at a time

The $39 CiteScore audit scores one URL on eight dimensions and returns about ten prioritized fixes.