How to Get Your Brand Cited by ChatGPT and Perplexity

To get cited by ChatGPT, let OpenAI’s search crawler reach your pages, write answers that can be quoted on their own, back them with specific facts, and get mentioned on the pages ChatGPT already cites. You can’t buy a citation. You can become the easiest source to quote.

I’ve watched this play out in analytics rather than theory. In two of our client accounts, ChatGPT sent more AI traffic than every other assistant combined. So this guide leans on what OpenAI has actually published, what large studies show, and what we’ve seen in real numbers.

How ChatGPT Decides What to Cite

ChatGPT answers in two ways. Sometimes it replies from what it learned in training, with no sources at all. Other times it runs a web search, pulls a batch of pages and cites some of them. Only the second route gives you a clickable citation, so that’s the one worth working on.

OpenAI’s publisher FAQ is refreshingly plain about the basics. Any public website can appear in ChatGPT search. To be included in summaries and snippets, though, your site must not block OAI-SearchBot, the crawler ChatGPT search uses. Block it, and you’re mostly out.

Then the competition starts. Retrieved isn’t the same as cited. ChatGPT reads more pages than it credits, and it tends to credit the passage that answers the question most cleanly. That’s the gap most of this guide is about closing.

What ChatGPT Traffic Looks Like in Real Accounts

Before the how-to, some numbers. For an ad agency client, uproas.io, AI assistants sent 1,639 sessions in the measured period, up 111%. ChatGPT accounted for 936 of them. Gemini sent 342, Perplexity 189, and Claude 173. The case study also reports 91 contact conversions, up 98%.

Two of that site’s pages stood out. A Facebook ads statistics page grew traffic by 675%. A Google Ads statistics page grew by 3,850%. Both are original, number-heavy reference pages, which is exactly the kind of thing an assistant likes to quote.

A jewelry ecommerce client tells a similar story. AI visitors went from 117 in January to 1,399 a month by December, and ChatGPT drove over 90% of them. Across the year, that channel produced 31 purchases and $29,174 in revenue, with an average order of $941.

Step 1: Make Sure OpenAI Can Reach Your Site

This sounds obvious. It isn’t. Plenty of sites blocked AI crawlers in a hurry and forgot. Is OAI-SearchBot disallowed in your robots.txt? Check. Then check your CDN, firewall or security plugin, because bot protection can block it before robots.txt even comes into play.

There’s one distinction worth knowing. OpenAI uses GPTBot for training and OAI-SearchBot for search. You can block GPTBot if you don’t want your content used to train models, and still allow OAI-SearchBot so your pages can be cited. They’re separate decisions.

Step 2: Write Passages That Stand on Their Own

ChatGPT quotes passages, not whole pages. So every section that answers a question should open with the answer, in a sentence or two that would still make sense if you lifted it out and pasted it somewhere else. No “as mentioned above”. No warm-up.

Make those passages specific. A number, a date, a named source, a clear definition. “Many businesses see results” gives an assistant nothing to cite. “AI sessions rose 111%” does. Keep pages updated, too. In an Ahrefs analysis of ChatGPT’s 1,000 most-cited pages, the citations skewed toward newer content.

Step 3: Publish Something Only You Have

If you’re serious about how to get cited by ChatGPT, this is the strongest lever. It’s also the one most brands skip. If your page repeats what twenty other pages say, ChatGPT can cite any of them. If it holds a number nobody else has, it has to cite you to use it.

That doesn’t need a research budget. Survey your customers. Publish benchmarks from your own data. Compile the statistics in your niche properly, with sources, the way those two ad statistics pages did. Original data is also what earns links, so you get paid twice for the same work.

Step 4: Get Mentioned Where ChatGPT Already Looks

Here’s the reality check. The same Ahrefs study found that only 32.3% of ChatGPT’s top 1,000 citations were pages marketers could realistically influence. The rest were things like reference sites, homepages, and app store listings. Nearly a third had no traditional search visibility at all.

So what do you actually do with that? Find out which pages ChatGPT cites for your prompts, then get your brand onto those pages. Roundups, comparison posts, and review platforms are usual suspects. Even unlinked brand mentions count here, which is one reason the brand mentions vs backlinks debate matters for AI.

Step 5: Rank in Normal Search Too

ChatGPT search still has to find your page somewhere. A Seer Interactive study of 10,000 questions found that ranking on page one of Google correlated strongly with ChatGPT brand mentions, at about 0.65. Backlinks on their own showed a weak or neutral effect.

Does that mean links don’t matter? Not quite. Links still help you rank, and ranking helps you get found. But a pile of links without a page worth quoting won’t get you cited in ChatGPT or in Google’s AI Overviews. Treat classic SEO as the entry ticket, not the whole game.

Step 6: Test and Track It Properly

Pick 20 to 30 prompts your customers would realistically ask. Run them in ChatGPT with search on, once a month, and log which domains get cited and whether you appear. Repeat in Perplexity. Same prompts every time, or the comparison means nothing.

For traffic, OpenAI says ChatGPT adds utm_source=chatgpt.com to referral links, so you can see sessions in Google Analytics without guesswork. Pair that with your prompt log, and you’ll know which pages earn citations, and which ones just get read. That’s how to get cited by ChatGPT on purpose rather than by luck.

What About Perplexity?

Most of the same rules apply. Perplexity searches the web for nearly every answer and shows its sources prominently, so citations are easier to win and easier to see. It runs its own crawler, PerplexityBot, so check your robots.txt and firewall for that one as well.

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