How do you get cited by AI search?
Make sure each assistant can find your page, read it, and see that it answers the question better than the alternatives. There's no form to fill in for any of them.
When someone asks Perplexity, Claude or Gemini a question that needs current information, the assistant searches the web, reads a handful of pages and writes an answer from them. The pages it leaned on are shown as citations. Your job is to be one of those pages, for the questions your buyers ask.
That means three things: being in the right index, being open to the right crawler, and being the clearest page on the subject.
What is a citation, and why does it matter?
A citation is the link an assistant shows to say where an answer came from. It's the AI search version of a ranking.
Citations matter twice. Someone who clicks one arrives already knowing what you do, because they've just read a summary of your page. And someone who doesn't click still sees your name next to the answer, which builds recognition the next time they ask.
Being cited isn't the same as being recommended. A citation says your page explained something. A recommendation says your business is the one to use. The two often go together, and our ChatGPT guide covers the recommendation side.
How does Perplexity choose its sources?
Perplexity searches its own index, built by its crawler, PerplexityBot, and shows numbered citations with every answer. If PerplexityBot can't reach your site, you're not in that index.
Perplexity is built around sources, so it tends to cite pages that answer the question directly and early. A page that opens with a clear definition, a short answer or a specific fact gives it something to quote. A page that opens with a long story doesn't.
It also runs a second agent, Perplexity-User, which fetches a page when someone asks about it directly. Allow both in robots.txt.
How does Claude find and cite pages?
When Claude searches the web, it draws on Brave and other sources, then reads the pages and cites the ones it used. Being visible in Brave's results helps, as well as Google and Bing.
Anthropic runs three agents. Claude-SearchBot improves Claude's search results, ClaudeBot collects data for training, and Claude-User fetches a page when someone asks Claude to look at it. Blocking ClaudeBot keeps you out of training, but blocking Claude-SearchBot or Claude-User can keep you out of Claude's answers.
How does Gemini choose what to cite?
Gemini grounds its answers with Google Search, so the pages that rank well in Google for a question are the ones it's most likely to draw on.
One setting catches people out. Google-Extended is a robots.txt token that controls whether your content is used to train Gemini models and to ground answers in Gemini apps. It doesn't affect Google Search, but blocking it can stop Gemini using your pages. If you want to be cited by Gemini, allow Googlebot and leave Google-Extended open.
What do all three reward?
The same things, broadly. The indexes differ, but what makes a page worth quoting doesn't.
- An answer in the first sentence or two after each heading, so it can be lifted out whole.
- Specific facts: prices, timings, places, steps and names, rather than general claims.
- Plain text in the HTML, not in images, PDFs or content that only loads with scripts.
- One clear page per topic, rather than the same answer spread thin across five pages.
- Backing from other sites: reviews, directory listings, comparison lists and press that agree with what you say.
What is the step-by-step method?
These are the eight steps we work through. One to three get you into each index. Four to eight make you the page that gets picked.
- Check robots.txt and your bot protection allow PerplexityBot, Perplexity-User, Claude-SearchBot, Claude-User, Googlebot and Google-Extended.
- Check your key pages are indexed in Google and Bing, and search Brave and Perplexity for them by name.
- Submit your sitemap to Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools, and turn on IndexNow.
- List the questions your buyers ask, and give each main one a page or a clear section.
- Answer each question straight after its heading, then add the detail, the exceptions and the proof.
- Put specific, checkable facts on every service page, and add structured data that matches them.
- Get mentioned on the sites the assistants already cite for your questions: directories, comparison lists, reviews and press.
- Run the same questions in Perplexity, Claude and Gemini every month, and log which pages each one cites.
How do you check whether you're being cited?
Ask the assistants your buyers' questions and look at the sources. Perplexity always shows them. Claude and Gemini show them when they've searched.
Keep a log: the question, the assistant, whether you were cited, which page and who else was cited. In analytics, visits from perplexity.ai, claude.ai and gemini.google.com show up as referrals, so set them up as their own channel. Our AI visibility checker gives you a ready-made set of questions to run.