Is ChatGPT Citing Your Website?

When someone asks ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity or Google's AI Overviews for a recommendation, the model assembles an answer from pages it can fetch, parse and trust. That is a different funnel to blue-link search. A page can rank respectably in Google and still never be quoted in an AI answer, usually for mechanical reasons: the content only appears after JavaScript runs, the page blocks AI crawlers in robots.txt, there is no clear factual statement to lift, or the site offers nothing that establishes who is talking.

The checker looks at the things that decide whether a model can use you: whether meaningful content exists in the raw HTML, whether AI crawler user agents are allowed, whether structured data describes the page, and whether headings pose and answer real questions.

First, answer the question in the first two sentences under each heading. Models extract self-contained passages; a paragraph that only makes sense after three scrolls of context will not be lifted. Second, use question-shaped headings that mirror how people actually ask, then answer them plainly underneath.

Third, add facts a model can attribute: prices, dates, numbers, named sources, the year. Vague marketing copy is unquotable by design. Fourth, decide deliberately about crawler access. GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot and Google-Extended each respect robots.txt. Blocking them protects your content from training use but also removes you from the answers, and for most small businesses being cited is worth far more than the content is. Whichever you choose, choose it on purpose rather than inheriting a default you never read.