How do you get ChatGPT or Perplexity to cite your page?
- Published November 6, 2026
- Linked from 1 answer
- In a cluster of 63
First make sure their search crawlers can reach the page, then make the page worth citing. Neither tool offers a submission form or paid placement for citations, and neither publishes how it chooses sources. What both do publish is how their crawlers work, and that is the part you control directly.
Let the right crawlers in
| Tool | Crawler for search answers | What its documentation says |
|---|---|---|
| ChatGPT search | OAI-SearchBot | "OAI-SearchBot is used to surface websites in search results in ChatGPT's search features." Sites that opt out "will not be shown in ChatGPT search answers, though can still appear as navigational links." |
| Perplexity | PerplexityBot | "PerplexityBot is designed to surface and link websites in search results on Perplexity. It is not used to crawl content for AI foundation models." |
Both companies separate search crawling from other uses. OpenAI’s bot documentation says each setting is independent, so a site can allow OAI-SearchBot for search while disallowing GPTBot, the crawler for model training; it adds that changes to robots.txt can take about 24 hours to take effect for search. Perplexity’s crawler documentation describes a separate Perplexity-User agent that visits pages when a user asks a question and may include a link to the page in its response. Check your robots.txt, your firewall, and any bot-blocking service for rules that stop these agents; a blanket block on AI crawlers also blocks the ones that send citations.
Make the page worth citing
Beyond access, neither company documents a ranking formula, so what follows is editorial practice rather than a published rule:
- Answer specific questions plainly. A page that states a clear, checkable answer gives a tool something it can quote with a link.
- Keep facts current and dated where they change. Prices, versions, and rules that go stale are a reason to cite a newer page.
- Show your sources. Linking claims to primary references makes the page easier to trust and verify.
- Be findable in ordinary search. Both tools retrieve web pages to answer questions; it is a reasonable inference, not a documented rule, that a page hard to find on the open web is hard for them to find too. Being findable makes a citation possible, not likely.
- Earn mentions elsewhere. Independent references to your work are evidence that others consider it reliable.
How to check whether it is working
Look for visits referred from chatgpt.com and perplexity.ai in your analytics, and ask both tools the questions your page answers to see which sources they cite. The same principles apply to Google’s AI features, and their specific eligibility rules come up in why a page can rank first but never get cited in AI answers. Underneath the tool-specific steps sits a broader question: whether AI search rewards the same signals as classic ranking. Results vary by question, location, account and over time, so track a fixed set of questions monthly, record the date, the location and the mode or model you used for each check, and read the pattern rather than any single answer.
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