How do you get ChatGPT to cite your website?

How does ChatGPT pick what to cite?

ChatGPT's browsing and search features pull candidate pages from a search index, then the model chooses which to quote. Pages win that selection when the relevant answer sits near the top, the heading matches the question, and the page's structured data confirms what it is about. Buried answers lose to direct ones.

Which crawlers need access?

OpenAI uses GPTBot for training and OAI-SearchBot for search citations, and other assistants bring their own: ClaudeBot for Anthropic, PerplexityBot for Perplexity, Google-Extended for Gemini grounding. If robots.txt blocks them, your content cannot appear in those answers no matter how good it is.

What should the page look like?

The page should answer the question before explaining it. Open with a two-sentence TL;DR, phrase your H2 headings as questions, and make the first sentence under each heading a complete answer. Add Article and FAQ schema so the engine can parse the page without guessing, and link to your own related pages to prove depth.

How long does it take to show up?

Days to weeks, not months, for long-tail questions. Low-competition phrases get crawled and surfaced quickly, which is why a focused seven-day sprint works: pick seven winnable keywords, ship one structured article per day, then check your keywords in ChatGPT and Claude, by hand in an incognito session or with automated daily visibility checks.

What is the fastest way to try this?

Run a free AI visibility check on your domain, fix any blocked crawlers, and generate one answer-first article for a keyword you care about. The whole loop takes under an hour, and it tells you exactly how far you are from being cited.