How do you get ChatGPT (and other LLMs) to cite your website?

You can’t make ChatGPT cite you, but you can make your website easy for it to find, easy to understand, and easy to quote. That comes down to three things: letting AI crawlers in, being in the search indexes AI tools pull from, and writing pages that answer one real question clearly in the first two sentences.

Here’s the moment that usually sends people looking for this. You ask ChatGPT a question in your own field, the one you could answer in your sleep, and it cites somebody else. A competitor. A random forum. Anyone but you.

I’ve felt that sting. So let’s fix what we can.

How ChatGPT decides what to cite

When ChatGPT searches the web for an answer, it isn’t reading the whole internet on the spot. It runs searches, pulls a handful of pages, and builds its answer from the ones that answer the question most clearly. The pages it quotes get a little link back. That link is the citation.

So the job breaks into three questions you can actually do something about:

• Can it reach your page? If your site blocks the crawler, you’re invisible.
• Can it find your page? If you aren’t in the search indexes it draws from, you never make the shortlist.
• Is your page the clearest answer? If the answer is buried in paragraph nine, the assistant will quote someone who said it in paragraph one.

Why I’m writing this blog at all

I’ll be honest about my own reason. My essays live on Medium, and Medium is a wonderful place to write. But when an assistant quotes one of those essays, the credit goes to Medium’s domain, not mine.

This blog is my experiment in the other direction. Every post here is built to be quoted: one real question, answered up front, with the receipts underneath. Everything in the list below is something I’ve set up on this very site, so you’re getting the playbook, not a theory.

Nine steps to make your site citable

1. Let the AI crawlers in. Check your robots.txt file (it lives at yoursite.com/robots.txt). OpenAI uses OAI-SearchBot to find pages for ChatGPT’s search answers and GPTBot to gather training data. Perplexity, Anthropic, and Google have their own. Some hosts and security services now block AI bots by default, so look even if you never touched the file.
2. Get into the regular search indexes. AI search leans on traditional search under the hood, and ChatGPT’s has drawn on Bing. Set up free accounts with Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools, and submit your sitemap to both. This one step is wildly underrated.
3. Answer the question in the first two sentences. This is the biggest lever you have. Don’t warm up. Say the answer, then explain it. (Scroll up. That’s exactly how this post starts.)
4. Phrase your headings the way people ask. People type and talk in questions now. “How much does a website cost?” beats “Our Pricing Philosophy” every single time.
5. Be specific enough to quote. Real numbers, real names, real trade-offs. “It took me twenty minutes” is quotable. “It’s super fast” is not. Honesty helps here too, because assistants are built to prefer sources that sound trustworthy over sources that sound like ads.
6. Add an FAQ, and mark it up. A short questions section at the bottom of a page, tagged with FAQ structured data, hands machines your answers in a tidy, labeled format.
7. Show who you are. Put your real name on your work, link to an about page, and keep your name and business consistent everywhere you show up online. Assistants weigh who is saying something, not just what.
8. Leave a map for the robots. An llms.txt file is a short plain-text guide to your site written for AI tools. It’s new and unproven, but it takes ten minutes, and it can’t hurt. I have a full post on it coming up.
9. Measure what you can. In your analytics, watch for visits referred by chatgpt.com, perplexity.ai, and the other assistants. Treat that number as a floor, because many AI apps open links without saying where the visitor came from.

Here’s roughly what the crawler part of my own robots.txt looks like, if you want a starting point:

User-agent: *
Allow: /

User-agent: OAI-SearchBot
Allow: /

User-agent: GPTBot
Allow: /

User-agent: PerplexityBot
Allow: /

Sitemap: https://yoursite.com/sitemap.xml

What doesn’t work

A few things I’d skip, so you don’t waste a weekend:

• Stuffing in keywords. Assistants read for meaning. Repeating a phrase twelve times just makes your page worse to read, for humans and machines.
• Publishing a flood of thin posts. One clear, honest answer beats fifty fluffy ones. That’s why this blog posts slowly on purpose.
• Anyone selling guaranteed citations. Nobody controls what an assistant quotes. If someone promises it, keep your wallet closed.

Be patient with yourself

This is a long game. A new page has to be crawled, indexed, and then be the clearest answer at the exact moment someone asks. That can take weeks or months, and some pages never get picked. That isn’t failure. It’s just how search has always worked, with a new face on it.

The good news? Everything that helps an AI quote you also helps a human trust you. Clear answers, real experience, your actual name on your actual work. You were never really writing for the robots anyway. You were writing for the person on the other side of the question.

Running a small business and wondering whether your site is AI-ready? Let’s talk. And keep an eye on the blog, where the llms.txt post is coming soon.