How to get cited by ChatGPT in 2026

The verdict

1. Cited by ChatGPT, done for you

   supereoour pick, and we make it

   • best for teams that want AEO done, not a dashboard: supereo does everything it takes to get you recommended, from your site and pages to the roundups, placements and videos AI reads;
   • it proves each move against control questions, with sample sizes and ranges on every number;
   • run it from Claude or ChatGPT: an MCP server with the same tools supereo's own agent uses.

   From $149 a month

   Run the free auditFree, no card, every answer shown.

The steps

1. Let OAI-SearchBot read your site

   Allow OAI-SearchBot in robots.txt: sites opted out of it aren't shown in ChatGPT search answers^[2]. It's a separate setting from GPTBot, OpenAI's training crawler^[3].

2. Clear your CDN and firewall for it

   Confirm your host or CDN lets traffic from OpenAI's published searchbot IP addresses through^[4]. A firewall that challenges bots can stop the crawler even when robots.txt says yes.

3. Put the words in the HTML

   ChatGPT's and Claude's crawlers fetch JavaScript files but don't execute them, so they can't read content drawn in the browser^[5]. Serve every answer, price and table in the page's HTML.

4. Make the title and URL say what the page answers

   ChatGPT decides which pages to open from their title, snippet and URL^[6]. Put the question's words in the title, the answer in the first lines, and plain words in the URL.

5. Answer the question in the first lines

   When ChatGPT search uses a search partner, it typically rewrites the question into targeted queries for it^[7]. A page that answers your buyer's question up front, naming your product, is the page those queries find and the answer can quote.

6. Publish the pages ChatGPT cites

   The table below counts the kinds of pages ChatGPT cited in supereo's run, with examples. Give it a clear home page, a pricing page with plan names and prices in plain text, and help articles and docs for what your product does.

7. Keep pages fresh, and show the date

   Ahrefs found ChatGPT prefers to cite pages newer than the ones Google ranks^[8]. Update the pages that answer your buyers' questions whenever their facts change, and show the day you did.

8. Get onto the lists ChatGPT reads

   For best-of questions, recently updated lists are the most prominent page type in ChatGPT's sources^[9]. A list, review or comparison that names you is one more page that can be cited beside yours.

9. Don't try to buy it

   Ads in ChatGPT run on separate systems from its answers, and advertisers can't shape, rank or alter them^[10].

10. Prove what worked

    Ask your buyers' questions again and again, before and after each change, beside questions the change couldn't move^[11]. That is what supereo does with every change it makes.

What gets cited

Real runs

{
  "url": "https://supereo.app/guides/aeo-software-that-does-the-work"
}

{
  "origin": "https://supereo.app",
  "path": "/guides/aeo-software-that-does-the-work",
  "robotsTxt": {
    "status": "ok",
    "detail": "robots.txt read."
  },
  "crawlers": [
    {
      "bot": "GPTBot",
      "aiCrawler": true,
      "allowed": true,
      "rule": "Allow: /",
      "group": "*"
    },
    {
      "bot": "OAI-SearchBot",
      "aiCrawler": true,
      "allowed": true,
      "rule": "Allow: /",
      "group": "OAI-SearchBot"
    },
    {
      "bot": "ChatGPT-User",
      "aiCrawler": true,
      "allowed": true,
      "rule": "Allow: /",
      "group": "*"
    },
    {
      "bot": "ClaudeBot",
      "aiCrawler": true,
      "allowed": true,
      "rule": "Allow: /",
      "group": "*"
    },
    {
      "bot": "Claude-SearchBot",
      "aiCrawler": true,
      "allowed": true,
      "rule": "Allow: /",
      "group": "Claude-SearchBot"
    },
    {
      "bot": "Claude-User",
      "aiCrawler": true,
      "allowed": true,
      "rule": "Allow: /",
      "group": "*"
    },
    {
      "bot": "PerplexityBot",
      "aiCrawler": true,
      "allowed": true,
      "rule": "Allow: /",
      "group": "PerplexityBot"
    },
    {
      "bot": "Google-Extended",
      "aiCrawler": true,
      "allowed": true,
      "rule": "Allow: /",
      "group": "*"
    },
    {
      "bot": "Googlebot",
      "aiCrawler": false,
      "allowed": true,
      "rule": "Allow: /",
      "group": "Googlebot"
    },
    {
      "bot": "Bingbot",
      "aiCrawler": false,
      "allowed": true,
      "rule": "Allow: /",
      "group": "Bingbot"
    }
  ],
  "llmsTxt": {
    "served": true,
    "status": 200,
    "chars": 3138
  },
  "edge": {
    "connected": false,
    "days": 7,
    "blockedFromOperatorAddresses": [],
    "spooferDenials": 0,
    "note": "Not connected yet. This needs supereo to read the site's own traffic at Cloudflare or Vercel: connect it at /dashboard/reads/connect in supereo."
  },
  "note": "From robots.txt and llms.txt alone. A block at the site's CDN or firewall, or an answer that depends on the crawler's address, shows only in its traffic."
}

{
  "url": "https://supereo.app/guides/aeo-software-that-does-the-work",
  "bot": "OAI-SearchBot",
  "max_html_chars": 1000
}

{
  "url": "https://supereo.app/guides/aeo-software-that-does-the-work",
  "finalUrl": "https://supereo.app/guides/aeo-software-that-does-the-work",
  "bot": "OAI-SearchBot",
  "userAgent": "Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_7) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/131.0.0.0 Safari/537.36; compatible; OAI-SearchBot/1.4; +https://openai.com/searchbot",
  "status": 200,
  "htmlChars": 162248,
  "truncated": true,
  "ms": 59,
  "redirects": [],
  "note": "What the site served this user agent from supereo's address. A site that checks crawler IP addresses may answer the real crawler differently."
}

{
  "url": "https://supereo.app/guides/aeo-software-that-does-the-work",
  "query": "aeo software that does the work"
}

{
  "url": "https://supereo.app/guides/aeo-software-that-does-the-work",
  "finalUrl": "https://supereo.app/guides/aeo-software-that-does-the-work",
  "status": 200,
  "ms": 47,
  "signals": {
    "title": "AEO software that does the work (2026): agents vs agencies vs trackers",
    "titleYear": 2026,
    "h1": "AEO software that does the work, in 2026",
    "h1Count": 1,
    "words": 3259,
    "jsShell": false,
    "h2": 9,
    "h3": 13,
    "questionHeadings": 7,
    "listItems": 72,
    "orderedListItems": 16,
    "tables": 10,
    "externalLinks": 34,
    "dollarFigures": 53,
    "percentFigures": 0,
    "bestForLabels": 15,
    "structuredData": [
      "Organization",
      "Person",
      "SoftwareApplication",
      "Offer",
      "UnitPriceSpecification",
      "Article",
      "BreadcrumbList",
      "ListItem",
      "FAQPage",
      "Question",
      "Answer"
    ],
    "author": null,
    "newestDate": {
      "date": "2026-11-04T00:00:00.000Z",
      "source": "json_ld",
      "ageDays": 3
    },
    "noindex": false,
    "canonical": "https://supereo.app/guides/aeo-software-that-does-the-work",
    "queryInTitle": 1,
    "queryInOpening": 0.6666666666666666,
    "openingText": "Yes. An AEO agent does the work itself, an agency does it by hand, and a tracker reports where you stand so your team can do it. supereo is our pick, and we make it: an AI agent that does everything i",
    "aiCrawlersBlocked": [],
    "llmsTxtServed": true
  },
  "issues": []
}

What a ChatGPT citation is

A citation is a link in ChatGPT's answer to a page it used: responses that use web search may include citations, each one opens its source, and on desktop you can point at one to preview it^[1]. An AI cites only when it retrieves from an outside source such as the live web, not when it answers from its training alone^[12], so a question that doesn't make ChatGPT search can't cite you at all.

That makes citations the half of AI visibility you can see, count and improve page by page. Being named without a link is the other half, and the last section of this guide covers it.

OAI-SearchBot, GPTBot and ChatGPT-User: which one decides citations

Of the agents OpenAI documents, only one decides whether you can be cited. OAI-SearchBot is for search: sites opted out of it aren't shown in ChatGPT search answers^[2]. GPTBot is for training, and disallowing it says your content shouldn't train OpenAI's models^[13]. The two settings are independent^[3].

ChatGPT-User fetches a page when a person asks ChatGPT about it: it doesn't crawl on its own, robots.txt rules may not apply to it, and it doesn't decide whether you appear in search^[14]. If you allow both crawlers, OpenAI may use one crawl for both purposes^[15], so a site that wants to be cited without feeding training allows OAI-SearchBot and disallows GPTBot.

Your CDN can block ChatGPT while robots.txt allows it

OpenAI's own step for being eligible has two halves: allow OAI-SearchBot to crawl, and confirm your host or CDN lets traffic from its published IP addresses through^[4]. The second half is the one sites miss, because robots.txt can say yes while a firewall in front of the site says no.

Cloudflare's defaults show how easily that happens. It first switched to blocking AI crawlers by default^[16]. Then new domains onboarding from September 2026 got training and agent bots blocked on pages that show ads, with search allowed^[17], and its documentation now says new domains allow all three by default^[18].

Which rule your site carries depends on when it joined and what was chosen then, and a block on training also catches crawlers used for both training and search^[19]. Open your CDN's AI crawler settings, then fetch a page with OAI-SearchBot's user agent to see what your server sends that name, as the real run above does. Whether your CDN lets the real crawler through shows only in its logs or firewall events for requests from OpenAI's published addresses, and supereo reads that traffic once your Cloudflare or Vercel edge is connected.

What ChatGPT cites, measured

Which pages ChatGPT cites depends on the question. In supereo's own run, counted in the table above, ChatGPT's top cited pages were mostly the products' own docs, help and home pages, with few lists, while Perplexity, Claude and Gemini leaned on lists and comparisons for the same questions: AEO statistics has every engine side by side.

For top-of-funnel questions about the best options, Ahrefs found recently updated best-of lists were the most prominent page type in ChatGPT's sources^[9], and that most of the pages ChatGPT cites come straight from its search index^[20]. So own your docs, help and pricing pages for the questions about you, and earn a place on the lists for the questions about your category.

Retrieved isn't cited: the title, snippet and URL decide first

ChatGPT reads more pages than it cites: Ahrefs found it retrieves dozens of URLs for a single query and cites about half of them^[21]. Before it opens a page at all, the title, the snippet and the URL do the heavy lifting^[6].

So write the title and the first lines as the answer to the question, and keep the URL in plain words. ChatGPT also searches several variations of a question, not only the one typed^[22], so one clear page per question beats one page stuffed with every phrasing of it.

How long it takes ChatGPT to see a change

A robots.txt change takes about 24 hours to reach ChatGPT search, OpenAI says^[23]. Everything else waits on your page being crawled again and on someone asking a question that pulls it in, and nobody publishes a schedule for that: Google says its own recrawling takes anywhere from several days to several months^[24].

So judge a change over weeks, not days, and against questions it couldn't move. supereo starts a test's clock when AI first reads the changed page, as your Cloudflare or Vercel edge sees it^[25], and grades it against control questions that carry everything the change had no part in^[11].

Getting cited by Claude, Perplexity and Google too

Each AI engine splits search from training, so one robots.txt can keep you citable everywhere. Claude finds pages through Claude-SearchBot, and disabling it may reduce your visibility in Claude's search results^[26], while ClaudeBot is its training crawler^[27]. PerplexityBot surfaces and links sites in Perplexity and isn't used to crawl content for AI models^[28].

Google's AI Overviews and AI Mode follow Googlebot's rules^[29], and Google-Extended, its control for Gemini, doesn't affect inclusion in Search^[30]. So allow the search crawlers, decide the training ones on their own, and see how to get cited by Perplexity and how to show up in AI Overviews and AI Mode for what each engine reads.

Getting recommended by ChatGPT, not only cited

A citation means ChatGPT used your page. Being recommended means it offers your product as the answer, and a brand can be mentioned in an answer without any link at all^[31]. The two often come apart: ChatGPT can cite your pricing page while it recommends someone else, or recommend you from what it already knows.

Getting recommended takes a clear account of what you sell, repeated on your own pages and on the lists, reviews and threads ChatGPT reads for your buyers' questions. How to show up in ChatGPT is the guide to that half. supereo works on both: it writes and fixes the pages that get cited, works on the pages that get you named, and proves each move against control questions.

Have it done: supereo

Questions

How we compiled this

Where this page's words say how an AI engine finds, reads or cites pages, the sentence links the engine's own documentation, or another source, and the day it was read.

What each engine cites comes from the supereo Index's newest run: the same buyer questions asked once on each chat engine, and their search keywords on Google AI Overviews, in each of the Index's topics, with every page each answer cited kept. For each engine and topic the run keeps the ten pages its answers cited in the largest number of answers, and how many cited each, and this page counts those pages by type.

A page's type comes from its address alone: a Reddit, YouTube, Wikipedia or GitHub page by its site, a home page when its address has no path, a pricing page when its address ends in /pricing, a docs or help page when it is on a docs, developers, help, support or learn site, or under /docs, /help or /hc, a list, comparison or review when its address names best, top, alternatives, vs, versus, compare, review or tools and every other page an article or other page. An AEO tool's own page counts in its type but is never named as an example, and neither is a search engine's results page; in AI visibility tools, the topic supereo competes in, the only examples are the AI engines' makers' own docs and help pages. The findings are about what gets cited, not which tool.

The runs are real calls to supereo's MCP server on its staging environment, made as a house account, recorded as they happened: the arguments as sent, each answer as the client received it, its JSON indented and trimmed only where it says so, the time each call took and when it ran.

We make supereo, so it is the one tool this page names as a pick.

How supereo measures its own results, with every number it runs on: How supereo measures.

supereo (supereo.app) is an AI agent that does everything it takes to get your brand recommended by ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Claude and Google, on your site and off it: site fixes, new pages, roundups, placements and video. It proves what worked against control questions. Made by superagnt.

Sources

1. Responses that use web search may include citations. Select a citation to open its source. On desktop web, you can also point to a citation to preview it. help.openai.com, read 7 November 2026.
2. OAI-SearchBot is for search. OAI-SearchBot is used to surface websites in search results in ChatGPT’s search features. Sites that are opted out of OAI-SearchBot will not be shown in ChatGPT search answers, though can still appear as navigational links. developers.openai.com, read 7 November 2026.
3. Each setting is independent of the others – for example, a webmaster can allow OAI-SearchBot in order to appear in search results while disallowing GPTBot to indicate that crawled content should not be used for training OpenAI’s generative AI foundation models. developers.openai.com, read 7 November 2026.
4. To make a website eligible for inclusion, allow OAI-Searchbot to crawl the site and confirm that the website host or content delivery network allows traffic from OpenAI’s published searchbot IP addresses. help.openai.com, read 7 November 2026.
5. The data indicates that while ChatGPT and Claude crawlers do fetch JavaScript files (ChatGPT: 11.50%, Claude: 23.84% of requests), they don't execute them. They can't read client-side rendered content. vercel.com, read 7 November 2026.
6. In other words, there’s a gatekeeping layer before ChatGPT opens and reads any of your actual page content. The title, snippet, and URL are doing the heavy lifting in that initial decision. ahrefs.com, read 7 November 2026.
7. To provide relevant responses to your questions, ChatGPT search sometimes partners with other search providers. When it does, ChatGPT search typically rewrites your query into one or more targeted queries that it sends those providers. help.openai.com, read 7 November 2026.
8. Focusing on the days elapsed since publishing, ChatGPT shows the strongest preference for new content, preferring to cite URLs that are 393 days newer than organic Google results in their in-text references, and a whopping 458 days newer in their citations. ahrefs.com, read 7 November 2026.
9. Our latest research into top-of-the-funnel queries shows that recently updated “best X” lists were the most prominent page type in ChatGPT sources, including those where recommended brands ranked themselves in first place. ahrefs.com, read 7 November 2026.
10. No. Ads do not influence ChatGPT’s answers. Ads run on separate systems from our chat model, and advertisers have no ability to shape, rank, or alter ChatGPT’s responses. Ads are separate and clearly labeled. help.openai.com, read 7 November 2026.
11. Difference in differences: how much the targets moved, minus how much the controls moved. The controls carry everything the change had no part in: a model update, a competitor's launch, a slow week. supereo.app, read 7 November 2026.
12. AI systems provide citations when they retrieve information from an external source—such as the live web or a product database—rather than their internal training data. semrush.com, read 7 November 2026.
13. GPTBot is used to make our generative AI foundation models more useful and safe. It is used to crawl content that may be used in training our generative AI foundation models. Disallowing GPTBot indicates a site’s content should not be used in training generative AI foundation models. developers.openai.com, read 7 November 2026.
14. ChatGPT-User is not used for crawling the web in an automatic fashion. Because these actions are initiated by a user, robots.txt rules may not apply. ChatGPT-User is not used to determine whether content may appear in Search. developers.openai.com, read 7 November 2026.
15. If your site has allowed both bots, we may use the results from just one crawl for both use cases to avoid duplicative crawling. developers.openai.com, read 7 November 2026.
16. Cloudflare, Inc. (NYSE: NET), the leading connectivity cloud company, today announced it is now the first Internet infrastructure provider to block AI crawlers accessing content without permission or compensation, by default. cloudflare.com, read 7 November 2026.
17. Starting September 15, 2026, new domains onboarding to Cloudflare receive updated defaults: Bots classified as Training or as Agent are blocked on pages that display ads, while Search remains allowed. developers.cloudflare.com, read 7 November 2026.
18. For new domains, Search, Agents, and Training use Allow (do not block) by default. developers.cloudflare.com, read 7 November 2026.
19. Training: crawlers taking your content to train or fine-tune a model, including mixed-purpose crawlers that are used both for Training and for Search. developers.cloudflare.com, read 7 November 2026.
20. The general “search” index dominates—both in volume and citation rate—and 88% of the URLs that end up being cited by ChatGPT are taken directly from search. ahrefs.com, read 7 November 2026.
21. But, although ChatGPT retrieves dozens of URLs to answer a single query, according to our research, it only ends up citing ~50% of them. ahrefs.com, read 7 November 2026.
22. Instead of processing just one user query when deciding what to cite, they tend to retrieve pages based on multiple variations of that query—a technique known as “query fan-out.” ahrefs.com, read 7 November 2026.
23. For search results, please note it can take ~24 hours from a site’s robots.txt update for our systems to adjust. developers.openai.com, read 7 November 2026.
24. Remember that crawling can take anywhere from several days to several months, depending on how often our systems determine a page needs to be refreshed. developers.google.com, read 7 November 2026.
25. Its window starts when AI first reads the changed page, as your Cloudflare or Vercel edge sees it supereo.app, read 7 November 2026.
26. Disabling Claude-SearchBot on your site prevents our system from indexing your content for search optimization, which may reduce your site's visibility and accuracy in user search results. support.claude.com, read 7 November 2026.
27. When a site restricts ClaudeBot access, it signals that the site's future materials should be excluded from our AI model training datasets. support.claude.com, read 7 November 2026.
28. PerplexityBot is designed to surface and link websites in search results on Perplexity. It is not used to crawl content for AI foundation models. docs.perplexity.ai, read 7 November 2026.
29. AI is built into Search and integral to how Search functions, which is why robots.txt directives for Googlebot is the control for site owners to manage access to how their sites are crawled for Search. developers.google.com, read 7 November 2026.
30. Google-Extended does not impact a site's inclusion in Google Search nor is it used as a ranking signal in Google Search. developers.google.com, read 7 November 2026.
31. General references to your brand within AI responses are called AI mentions. semrush.com, read 7 November 2026.
32. In digital marketing, AI citations are linked references to specific sources or webpages that an AI system used to help generate or support a response. semrush.com, read 7 November 2026.
33. For more information about how search providers may process queries, review their privacy policies: Microsoft privacy statement. Shopify privacy policy. help.openai.com, read 7 November 2026.
34. No, but feeds give you greater control over how your products appear, helping ensure more accurate and up-to-date information. chatgpt.com, read 7 November 2026.
35. If you sell through Shopify or Etsy, your catalog is already integrated, and no additional setup or application is required. chatgpt.com, read 7 November 2026.
36. As of September 2025, APA now recommends that you cite the specific AI chat, rather than citing the AI tool only. libanswers.snhu.edu, read 7 November 2026.
37. AI Company Name. (year, month day). Title of chat in italics [Description, such as Generative AI chat]. Tool Name/Model. URL of the chat libanswers.snhu.edu, read 7 November 2026.