Guides to being cited by AI

AI answer engines such as ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Google AI Overviews decide which sources to quote based on whether their crawlers can reach a page, whether they can parse it, and whether it answers the question directly. These guides cover the parts you control, written to separate what vendors have documented from what is still folklore. We update them as vendor documentation changes.

Where to start

1. Confirm robots.txt and your CDN are not blocking the search and user-triggered AI crawlers.
2. Add JSON-LD that names your organization and describes your main pages.
3. Answer your customers' real questions directly, near the top of the page, under clear headings.
4. Publish dated content regularly, so there is something recent for engines to retrieve.
5. Measure citations on a fixed set of questions every week, so you can see what changed.

• November 2, 2026

  Which AI crawlers should you allow in robots.txt?

  Blanket-blocking "AI bots" is one of the most common reasons a site is never cited. The major vendors run several crawlers with different jobs, and only some of them decide whether you can appear in an answer. Here is each user agent, what it does, and a robots.txt that stays citable.

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• November 2, 2026

  How to check whether ChatGPT, Perplexity and Gemini cite your site

  Nobody gives you a dashboard for how often ChatGPT recommends you, but you can measure it yourself with a spreadsheet and an hour. This guide covers the difference between a mention and a citation, how to write buyer questions, why you must repeat every run, and how to read the results.

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• November 2, 2026

  llms.txt explained: what it is and whether to add one

  llms.txt is a plain markdown file at the root of your site that gives language models a curated map of your best pages. Here is the exact format, an honest look at whether any AI engine uses it to pick citations, and why it can still be worth adding.

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