Is ChatGPT citing your website?

Step 1: Ask the Assistants, On Purpose

There is no rankings report for AI search, so the check is manual and it is worth doing properly. Write down the ten questions a buyer would ask before choosing you. Ask each one in ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Perplexity, in a fresh conversation with no personalisation and no mention of your brand name. Record three things per question: whether you appear, what you were credited with, and which competitor was named instead.

Repeat monthly, on the same list. A single check tells you almost nothing because answers vary between runs. A monthly log tells you whether you are gaining ground.

Step 2: Separate Assistant Referrals in Your Analytics

Visits sent by an assistant arrive from a small set of identifiable sources, so they can be counted separately from Google. Group them in one report and watch two numbers: how many visits arrive, and what they do next. Expect a low volume and a conversion rate several times higher than organic search, because the visitor has already been recommended rather than being handed ten options.

Step 3: Confirm the Crawlers Can Actually Read You

This is where most sites quietly fail. Two failures matter. First, a robots file that does not explicitly allow the AI crawlers, including GPTBot, OAI-SearchBot, ClaudeBot and PerplexityBot. Second, a site that builds its content in the browser, so a crawler that does not run JavaScript receives an empty shell.

Test the second one by fetching your page as plain source rather than viewing it in a browser. If your headline and body text are not in that source, no assistant can quote you, and nothing you write will change that until the rendering is fixed.

What the Three Common Results Mean

You are never named and a competitor always is. Usually a content problem. The competitor has a page dedicated to that exact question with a quotable answer near the top, and you have the topic buried inside a longer page.

You are named but described wrongly. The assistants are reading you, but the clearest statement of what you do is somewhere unhelpful, such as a testimonial or an old article. Fix the plain-language description on your main pages and your identity markup.

You are named on brand questions only. You own your own name and nothing else. Build pages for the questions people ask before they know you exist.

How Long Changes Take to Show Up

Slower than Google. Assistants refresh their view of a site on their own schedule, so a page published today may start appearing in answers weeks later. That delay is a reason to start the monthly log now rather than after the next rewrite, so you have a baseline to compare against.

You cannot improve what you never measured. Ten questions, four assistants, once a month, in writing.