How to get your website cited by ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google AI Mode

Posted on Oct 26 • Originally published at vishalsolanki.online on Oct 26

More people now ask an assistant "who's a good web developer in Noida?" or "how much does a website cost?" instead of scrolling ten blue links. When the answer names three businesses, being one of them is the new page one.

This is often called GEO (generative engine optimisation) or AEO (answer engine optimisation). Most of it is ordinary good SEO, plus a few things that now matter more than they used to.

An honest caveat: none of the AI companies publish exactly how they choose sources. What follows is what their crawler documentation says, plus what keeps showing up in 2026 industry studies. Treat precise percentages you see online, including in vendor reports, as rough signals.

When an assistant answers without searching, it falls back on what it learned in training, which comes from the public web: GitHub, Reddit, Stack Overflow, news sites, popular blogs. Getting into that takes being mentioned in those places over time.

Start with robots.txt. "Allow everyone" is the simplest setting that keeps you visible:

User-Agent: * Allow: / Sitemap: https://www.example.com/sitemap.xml Enter fullscreen mode Exit fullscreen mode If you ever add rules, know which bot does what:

Then check the layer robots.txt can't see: your CDN or hosting firewall. Some bot-protection presets block AI crawlers by default. Test it directly:

curl -s -o /dev/null -w "%{http_code} \n " \ -A "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; OAI-SearchBot/1.0; +https://openai.com/searchbot)" \ https://www.example.com/ Enter fullscreen mode Exit fullscreen mode You want 200. A 403 means something in front of your site is turning the crawler away.

Bing is easy to forget, and it feeds Microsoft Copilot and part of ChatGPT search.

Assistants build answers out of short, self-contained passages. Pages that get cited tend to make that easy:

Pricing depends on many factors, so every project is different. Get in touch for a quote tailored to your needs.

A 5–8 page business website in Next.js typically takes 3–5 weeks. Price depends mainly on design work, CMS needs and integrations; tell me those three and I can give you a range on the first call.

The second version answers a real question in a way an assistant can repeat and attribute.

An assistant has to be confident that "Your Name, web developer, Your City" is one specific person or business with a specific speciality. Help it:

This is the step most people skip, and it's the one that moves the needle most. Industry studies in 2026 keep finding that mentions of a brand on other trusted sites line up with AI citations more closely than backlinks alone, and that many cited pages aren't in Google's top ten at all.

There's no single "AI rank" to check, so measure it three ways.

A monthly prompt check. On the first of each month, ask the same questions in ChatGPT (with search on), Perplexity, Gemini, Copilot and Claude, and log the answers:

The last column is the useful one. It shows you which sites and lists the assistants trust, so you know where to get yourself listed.

Referral traffic. In Google Analytics, look for sessions from chatgpt.com, perplexity.ai, gemini.google.com, copilot.microsoft.com and claude.ai. ChatGPT adds utm_source=chatgpt.com to many of its links. Group them into one "AI assistants" channel.

Ask your leads. Add "How did you find me?" to your contact form with an "AI assistant" option. Analytics can't see someone who read your name in a chat and typed your URL later; the form can.

Google has also started rolling out an AI Overviews and AI Mode report in Search Console. It's in beta, shows impressions only and isn't available for every site yet.

llms.txt is a proposed Markdown file at the root of your site that summarises it for language models. No major search engine has confirmed using it, and Google has said it doesn't. It takes ten minutes to write, so add one if you like, but don't expect it to change anything on its own.

All of these risk your normal search rankings too, and assistants increasingly lean on the same quality signals.

No. OpenAI uses separate crawlers: GPTBot collects training data, and OAI-SearchBot is what surfaces sites in ChatGPT search. You can block one and allow the other.

No. AI Overviews and AI Mode are part of Google Search and use Googlebot. Google-Extended only controls use of your content for Gemini outside Search.

Being named for your own name can happen within weeks once you're indexed and your profiles agree with each other. Being recommended for competitive local or niche questions usually takes months, because it depends on mentions building up on other sites.

I build sites that are fast, findable in search and easy for AI assistants to quote. Tell me about yours.

Originally published on vishalsolanki.online.