How to get your site cited by ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity

A growing share of buying research now happens inside AI assistants. Someone asks ChatGPT 'best AI chat widget for a small store' and gets a synthesized answer with a handful of citations. If your site isn't legible to these systems, you're not losing the click — you're absent from the conversation entirely.

The good news: AI visibility rewards exactly the things worth doing anyway — clear structure, honest self-description, crawlable content.

Ship an llms.txt

llms.txt is a plain-markdown map of your site written for machines: what you do, key facts, and annotated links to your important pages. When an assistant fetches your site, it gets your framing in one request instead of reconstructing it from navigation menus.

Keep it current, keep it honest, and link it from your footer — assistants and the people testing them both find it faster that way.

Don't block the crawlers you want

Audit your robots.txt. Plenty of sites block GPTBot, ClaudeBot, and PerplexityBot by default — a reasonable stance for a publisher monetizing content, a self-inflicted wound for a product company that wants to be recommended. Allow the assistants' crawlers on your marketing and docs pages; keep dashboards and APIs disallowed.

Write answer-shaped pages

Assistants extract and cite passages, not vibes. Pages that state facts plainly — pricing with numbers, integration lists, honest comparisons, FAQs with real questions as headings — get quoted. Pages that are all adjectives get skipped.

This is the same discipline that makes an on-site AI agent good, which is no coincidence: if your own agent can answer a question from your content with a citation, an external assistant probably can too. Your grounded agent is, among other things, a continuous test of how legible your site is to machines.