How to get your website cited by ChatGPT, Claude and Google's AI answers

The question your best page already answers

Somewhere right now, a person is asking an AI assistant the exact question your best article answers. The assistant writes a tidy paragraph, adds a few links, and moves on. Your site is in those links, or it is not.

Most advice about this sounds like a secret handshake. The truth is more ordinary, and that is good news: you can check most of it yourself in five minutes. Nobody can promise you a citation, including us. What you can do is remove the blockers and give these systems a page worth quoting.

What Google says

Google's own documentation is blunt. It says: "There are no additional requirements to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode, nor other special optimizations necessary." It also says: "You don't need to create new machine readable files, AI text files, or markup to appear in these features."

What does count is ordinary search eligibility. The page must be "indexed and eligible to be shown in Google Search with a snippet." Google's advice is to create helpful, reliable, people-first content, let crawlers in through robots.txt, link your pages together, and keep structured data accurate.

Crawlers: one switch per job

Each AI company runs more than one crawler, and each crawler has its own job.

OpenAI uses OAI-SearchBot to surface sites in ChatGPT search. To help ensure your site appears there, its documentation recommends allowing OAI-SearchBot in your robots.txt file and allowing requests from its published IP ranges. GPTBot is a separate crawler used for training, and disallowing it signals that your content should not be used to train generative AI foundation models. ChatGPT-User acts when a person asks for something specific, and OpenAI notes that robots.txt rules may not apply to those requests.

Anthropic describes three crawlers. ClaudeBot collects content that could contribute to training. Claude-User retrieves pages when a person asks Claude a question. Claude-SearchBot improves search result quality, and Anthropic says blocking it may reduce your site's visibility in user search results.

Google's Google-Extended token controls whether your content may be used to train future Gemini models and for grounding. Google says it "does not impact a site's inclusion in Google Search nor is it used as a ranking signal in Google Search."

So training and search are separate decisions. A blanket rule that blocks every bot can quietly switch off the crawlers that decide whether you get quoted.

One caution. A 2026 paper presented at SIGIR found that websites blocking Google-Extended were cited less often by Gemini and AI Overviews, and called the AI Overviews result surprising. That is a correlation from one study, and Google's documentation says the token does not affect Search, so treat it as an open question and not as a rule.

What to write so a machine can quote you

A paper called GEO: Generative Engine Optimization, first posted in late 2023, tested ways of changing a page so that generative engines would feature it more. Three methods helped most. On one measure, adding quotations improved visibility by about 41%, adding statistics by about 31%, and citing sources by about 28%. Stuffing in keywords, the old search trick, gave little to no improvement.

One result stands out for anyone who is not already at the top. The effect depended on rank. For a site ranked fifth in the paper's tests, citing sources raised visibility by 115.1%, while the top-ranked site lost 30.3%. Lower-ranked sites had more to gain.

Keep the caveat in view. These were tests on a research benchmark, not promises about how ChatGPT or Google behave today, and a 2026 ACM paper notes that the effectiveness of GEO is contested. Treat the findings as a reason to write well, not as a trick.

In practice, that means a few habits:

• Put the answer in the first two sentences, then explain it.
• Name your source and link to it whenever you state a number.
• Quote real people or documents with attribution, and never invent a quote.
• Write headings the way people phrase questions, and add a short FAQ.
• Show an author and an updated date, so a reader can see who stands behind the page.

The five-minute check

Open yourdomain.com/robots.txt in a browser and read it. Look for two things.

First, a line that says Disallow: / under User-agent: * or under a specific crawler name. That blocks the whole site for that crawler. Second, whether OAI-SearchBot, Claude-SearchBot or Googlebot has a Disallow rule. If you want to show up in ChatGPT search, Claude search and Google, none of them should be blocked.

Then check one more place: your firewall or security plugin. OpenAI recommends allowing requests from its published IP ranges, and Google says crawling has to be allowed by any CDN or hosting infrastructure too. A robots.txt that says yes does not help if a security rule says no.

At the time of writing, this blog's robots.txt asks crawlers to stay out of the CMS back end, leaves public media files open, and points to the sitemap. If you are weighing hosting for a site like this, our piece on what AI-powered hosting actually changes explains where automation helps and where people still matter.

The one message worth forwarding

Copy this into a message to your web developer or host:

"Can you confirm that OAI-SearchBot, Claude-SearchBot and Googlebot are allowed in our robots.txt, and that our firewall is not blocking them?"

It is one sentence, it takes them a few minutes, and it clears a problem that is easy to miss and hard to see from the outside. Send it today. Then spend the rest of your effort on the part nobody can automate: writing a page that is worth citing.