How to get your site cited by ChatGPT and Perplexity (what you can and can't control)
Updated 10 November 2026
No one can guarantee that ChatGPT or Perplexity will cite your site, but you can remove the common blockers: stay crawlable, answer questions in your first sentence, publish original data, keep your facts consistent, and make pages easy to quote.
AI answer tools pull from the web, so being easy to find and easy to quote helps. Anyone selling a sure way to get cited is guessing. Here is what is within your control.
1. Stay crawlable
If your robots.txt blocks AI crawlers, they cannot read you. Check it for rules aimed at crawlers such as GPTBot or PerplexityBot, and decide on purpose whether to allow them. Also make sure your key pages are not set to noindex and do not sit behind a login.
2. Answer first
Put a direct answer in the first sentence under the heading. Assistants tend to lift the clearest, most self-contained sentence. Question-style headings that match what people type help too.
3. Publish something original
A number that exists nowhere else is worth citing. We published a dataset from 365 homepage audits and archived it with a DOI so anyone can cite it: doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.24107369. Add the caveats honestly, since a claim that cannot survive a reader will not last.
4. Keep your facts consistent
Use the same name, one-line description, price and links everywhere: your site, GitHub, directories and social profiles. Mixed facts make it harder for any system to trust one version.
5. Make the page easy to read
One clear H1, readable titles and descriptions, and a short summary file such as llms.txt give crawlers a clean view. None of these is a promise, only a cleaner path.
What we cannot tell you
Which sources an assistant picks changes by product, by question and over time. Measure it by asking the questions your customers ask and noting who is cited, and expect it to move. Marlo's GEO agent runs a search-based citation check for this, which is a real search rather than a model's opinion.
Check your own site
Marlo's free audit crawls your homepage and checks the title, description, headings, canonical and social tags, with the fix for each. No signup.
Written by Marlo's maker. Marlo is open source (AGPL-3.0) and the audit code is public.