Does ChatGPT cite my website?

How to check it yourself

1. 01Write five questions a buyer would ask before choosing you: "best [category] for [situation]", "alternatives to [the leader]", "[category] that does [your differentiator]". Do not include your brand name.
2. 02Open a fresh session on ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini. Memory and previous chats bias the answer; start clean.
3. 03For each answer, note the date, the names given, and the sources cited. Whether you appear is one column; who appears instead is the more useful one.
4. 04Fetch your own pages the way a crawler does: curl with no JavaScript. If the text is not in the response, the engines have never read it.
5. 05Repeat in two weeks. Answers drift; the trend is the signal, one reading is not.

This is the procedure the free audit runs for you, with the results recorded in a report you can share. The scoring is published on the methodology page.

If the answer is no

• 01

  The crawler saw nothing

  GPTBot, ClaudeBot and PerplexityBot do not run JavaScript. If your page's text arrives only after scripts execute, they read an empty shell. Server-rendered HTML fixes it.

• 02

  Access is blocked

  A robots.txt line written years ago for scrapers now blocks the engines you want. Check GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot and Google-Extended explicitly.

• 03

  The engine cannot classify you

  Your homepage, your directories and the structured databases the models read describe you differently. When sources disagree, engines play safe and name someone else.

• 04

  No page answers the question

  Buyers ask 'best X for Y' and 'alternatives to Z'. If no page on your site addresses that question in those words, there is nothing to cite.

• 05

  Nobody else says you exist

  Most of what engines cite is earned: articles, comparisons, forum threads. Your own site claiming to be the best does not count; a third party listing you does.

FAQ

How do I know if ChatGPT cites my website?

Ask it the questions a buyer would ask, in a fresh session, without naming your brand, and record which sources it cites. Repeat across engines and dates. A single answer proves little; a set of prompts observed on a date is evidence. Our free audit does this and records query, engine, date and cited source for every observation.

Why does ChatGPT not mention my company?

The usual reasons, in order: its crawlers are blocked by robots.txt or see an empty page because your content is rendered by JavaScript; the engine cannot tell what you are because your site and the databases it reads disagree; there is no page that answers the question in the buyer's words; and nobody else on the web says you are an option, so the engine names those who are mentioned.

Is being cited by ChatGPT the same as ranking on Google?

No. Google ranks pages; answer engines compose an answer and cite a handful of sources. A site can rank well and never be cited, or be cited for a question it does not rank for. They share a foundation (crawlable, clear, trustworthy pages) but are measured differently.

Which crawlers should my site allow?

GPTBot (OpenAI), ClaudeBot (Anthropic), PerplexityBot and Google-Extended, at minimum. If robots.txt blocks them, nothing else about GEO applies until it is fixed.

Can I be cited without paid ads?

Yes; answer engines do not sell citations. They cite pages that are readable, specific and corroborated by other sources. Comparison pages, precise product facts and mentions on third-party sites are what move it.