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

If AI assistants can't read your site, they won't cite it. A growing share of buying research now happens inside these 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 missing from that answer entirely.

The work is mostly things worth doing anyway: clear structure, a plain description of what you do, and content a crawler can reach.

Ship an llms.txt

llms.txt is a plain markdown map of your site written for machines: what you do, the facts that matter, and annotated links to your important pages. When an assistant fetches your site, it gets your framing in one request and skips the guesswork of reading navigation menus.

Keep it current and accurate, and link it from your footer. Assistants find it faster that way, and so do the people testing them.

Let in the crawlers you want

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

Write answer-shaped pages

Assistants extract and cite passages. Pages that state facts plainly get quoted: pricing with numbers, integration lists, fair comparisons, FAQs with real questions as headings. Pages that are all adjectives get skipped.

The same discipline makes an on-site AI agent good. If your own agent can answer a question from your content with a citation, an external assistant probably can too.

Use Agentmatica to test your pages every day

Agentmatica answers your shoppers from the same pages you want ChatGPT to quote, so every conversation checks how legible they are. A shopper asks, 'Do you ship to Canada, and what does it cost?' If your shipping page says so, the agent answers and links that page. If it doesn't, the agent says it doesn't know and your team can take the chat over live.

Those gaps show up under Needs attention in Insights as the questions your content can't answer yet. Add the missing fact to the page, Agentmatica recrawls it, and the next shopper gets a cited answer. The page an outside assistant reads is now better too.