How to get cited by ChatGPT, Perplexity and AI Overviews

The mechanical part nobody checks

Google renders JavaScript before it indexes. The AI crawlers now driving a meaningful share of discovery — GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot and the rest — largely do not. They fetch your HTML and read what is in it.

That single difference invalidates a lot of modern front-end practice. Content that appears only after a component mounts, statistics that animate up from zero, FAQ answers that exist only when an accordion is open, structured data injected by a script tag after page load — all of it is invisible to a crawler that never runs the script. Fetch your own page with JavaScript disabled and read what comes back. It is usually a surprise.

The content shape that gets quoted

• Answer first. Lead with the direct answer in two or three sentences, then justify it. Models lift the compact statement, not the build-up.
• Be specific. 'Pricing varies by requirement' is unquotable. A starting figure, a range, a timeline or a threshold is quotable.
• Show the trade-off. Comparisons that admit when the other option wins read as credible and get cited more than one-sided pages.
• Structure honestly. Headings that describe the section, tables for comparisons, lists for steps. This helps extraction as much as it helps a reader.
• Date it. Published and updated dates in the markup let an engine prefer your current answer over a stale one.

The entity work

Being recommended as a vendor is not a page-level property, it is an entity-level one. The engine needs a consistent picture of who you are: the same business name, address and phone number everywhere; Organization and LocalBusiness markup that agrees with the visible page; service pages that state plainly what you do and where; and third-party sources — directories, profiles, listings — that corroborate it. Contradictions between your site and the rest of the web are what keep a business out of a shortlist.

What to put in the markup

1. Organization with logo, address, contact point and sameAs links to your real profiles.
2. LocalBusiness or ProfessionalService with geo and areaServed, if you serve a place.
3. A Service page per offering, each with its own URL, rather than anchors on one page.
4. FAQPage only where the questions are actually rendered — mismatched markup is a liability, not a boost.
5. Article with author and dates on anything you want cited as a source.

Let the crawlers in

Check robots.txt. Many sites block AI user agents by default through a security plugin or a CDN bot rule, then wonder why they are never cited. Blocking is a legitimate choice for a publisher protecting an archive; for a business that wants to be recommended to buyers, it is a decision worth making deliberately rather than inheriting.

How to tell whether it is working

• Ask the assistants directly, in the words a buyer would use, and record what comes back over time.
• Watch referrals from chatgpt.com, perplexity.ai and similar sources in analytics — small numbers, but high intent.
• Track branded search volume; being mentioned in an answer often shows up as people searching your name afterwards.
• Watch server logs for GPTBot, ClaudeBot and PerplexityBot to confirm you are being fetched at all.