How to Get Your Site Cited by ChatGPT

A repeatable, 7-step playbook to make ChatGPT (and Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, Claude) quote your site as a source. Covers crawlability, direct-answer formatting, schema, entity signals, and citation tracking.

1. Step 1

   Allow AI crawlers in robots.txt

   Explicitly allow GPTBot, PerplexityBot, ClaudeBot, Google-Extended, and OAI-SearchBot in your robots.txt. Many WordPress security plugins block them by default.

   Tip · Test with curl -A 'GPTBot' https://yoursite.com — you should get a 200, not a 403.
2. Step 2

   Publish an llms.txt file

   Create /llms.txt at your root listing your canonical pages, product descriptions, and key facts in markdown. This is the AI-era equivalent of sitemap.xml for language models.

3. Step 3

   Write a 40-80 word direct answer up top

   For every target question, put the extractable answer in the first paragraph. LLMs preferentially quote from the top 200 words of a page.

   Tip · Lead with the noun phrase, not 'In this article we will…'.
4. Step 4

   Add FAQPage or Article schema

   Wrap Q&A blocks in FAQPage JSON-LD and long-form posts in Article JSON-LD with author, datePublished, and dateModified. Use our Schema Generator tool.

5. Step 5

   Establish entity signals

   Add Organization JSON-LD with sameAs pointing to LinkedIn, Wikipedia, Crunchbase, and GitHub. Publish author pages with Person schema. Entities are how LLMs decide who to trust.

6. Step 6

   Get cited on sites AI already trusts

   Guest posts, podcast interviews, and Wikipedia/Wikidata mentions feed LLM training corpora. One Reddit or Substack citation often outweighs ten low-authority backlinks.

7. Step 7

   Track citations weekly

   Run your target prompts through ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews. Log which engines cite you vs competitors. Iterate on the pages that are close to being cited.

   Tip · Use our free AI Citation Tracker tool to automate this.