How Do I Get My Website Cited in ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google AI Mode? Why Each One Picks Different Sources

Wondering how to get cited by ChatGPT? First, bad news. It’s not one channel. ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google AI Mode read from different places and each has its pet sources, so it’s very normal to get quoted by one and ignored by the other two. Same question. Same day. Same website.

“How do we get into ChatGPT?” We hear that one a lot. Usually said like ChatGPT is a single shop window and there’s one key to it.

There isn’t. There are at least three windows, and they’re run by different people.

Picture a clinic owner in Pune. Searches “best physiotherapist in Kothrud” on Google, sees their clinic in the AI Overview, feels great. Asks ChatGPT the same thing on the drive home. Not there. Tries Perplexity out of curiosity. Two competitors and a Practo listing. Same question, three different answers, and the owner’s left wondering which one is “right”.

Does ChatGPT Use Google’s Index to Find Sources?

Not really, no. ChatGPT search has its own crawler, OAI-SearchBot, and leans on third-party search providers too. Google’s AI Mode and AI Overviews, meanwhile, live off Google’s own index. So yes, ranking on Google helps a bit. Does it mean ChatGPT will ever find you, let alone quote you? Nope.

OpenAI’s crawler documentation spells it out. OAI-SearchBot is the one that decides whether you show up in ChatGPT search answers. GPTBot is a separate bot for model training. People mix them up all the time and block the wrong one.

Does ChatGPT use Google search results, then? Not as its main source, no. And the numbers back that up. Semrush compared over 150,000 citations in its AI Mode study and found Perplexity’s cited domains overlapped with Google’s top 10 more than 91 percent of the time. AI Overviews, roughly 86 percent. AI Mode, only around 54. ChatGPT had the lowest overlap of the lot.

So if you’re top three on Google and invisible in ChatGPT, that’s not a glitch. That’s just how it’s built.

Why Does Perplexity Cite My Competitor and Not Me?

Nine times out of ten, they’re just better covered in places Perplexity likes reading. It follows Google pretty closely, so rankings count, but it also loves a forum thread, a review site, a “top 10” list. Your rival ranks a notch higher and pops up in more of that stuff? They get quoted. You don’t.

Funny thing is, people assume Perplexity is the mysterious one. It’s actually the most Google-like of the three, going by that 91 percent overlap. So if a competitor beats you there, check Google first. Who outranks you for that question, and on which page?

Then look at what else gets cited. Semrush found Reddit was the leading citation source across all the AI engines it studied. Not brand websites. Reddit. So if your competitor gets recommended in a couple of genuine Reddit threads and you don’t, that’s often the gap. Annoying, but fixable.

Could My Robots.txt or Firewall Be Blocking AI Crawlers?

Could be, and honestly it’s where we’d look before anything else. Some robots.txt line a developer added in 2021, an overkeen security plugin, a CDN setting nobody remembers switching on. Any of those can shut out OAI-SearchBot or PerplexityBot. And if the bot can’t get in? Your lovely content doesn’t matter one bit.

This one catches loads of sites out. Cloudflare, for instance, switched to blocking AI bots by default for sites it hosts back in July 2025. Plenty of owners never noticed. Their content was fine, their rankings were fine, and the door was simply locked.

Open your robots.txt and look for disallow rules on OAI-SearchBot and PerplexityBot. Then check your firewall or CDN settings. Perplexity’s own crawler docs suggest allowlisting its published IP ranges, because firewalls tend to treat unfamiliar bots as suspicious. OpenAI says robots.txt changes take about 24 hours to show up in its search, so don’t panic if nothing changes by lunchtime.

Want GPTBot blocked for training but still want to be found in search? Totally fine. Block GPTBot, allow OAI-SearchBot. They’re separate on purpose.

The most common mistake we see is treating ‘AI search’ as one channel. A brand can be cited consistently in Google AI Overviews and be completely absent in ChatGPT for the same question, because the two are reading different sources. You cannot fix what you are not measuring separately. Run a prompt like “best physiotherapy clinic in Kothrud” through all three engines and you’ll often see one clinic named in Google’s AI Overview, a different one in ChatGPT and a directory listing in Perplexity.

— Vishal Singh, Performance Marketing Specialist

Does Schema Markup Help Get Cited in AI Answers?

A little. Not the way people hope, though. Google has actually said you don’t need any special schema to show up in AI Overviews or AI Mode. Think of schema as labels on boxes. Handy for whoever’s unpacking, but nobody picks a box because of the label.

Google’s guidance on AI features is pretty blunt. No extra requirements, no special structured data, no new AI files. Be indexed, be eligible for a snippet, write helpful stuff for people.

So why do we still add it? It cuts the guessing. Organization markup confirms your proper name and which social profiles are really yours, which matters more than you’d think if there’s a similarly named company two cities over. LocalBusiness sorts out address and hours. Worth doing. Just don’t expect fireworks.

Is There One Playbook for How to Get Cited by Chatgpt, Perplexity and AI Mode?

Half of it is shared. The other half isn’t.

What works everywhere is fairly unglamorous. Answer the question near the top, under a heading that sounds like the question. Make sure your business is described the same way on your site, your Google profile, LinkedIn and the directories, because if one says “physio clinic” and another says “wellness centre”, the engines get muddled. Every so often publish something nobody else has, your own pricing data, a little survey, a proper before and after. AI tools are weirdly fond of quoting a number they can’t find anywhere else. Oh, and a real human’s name on the article, with a bio that proves they’ve done the work.

Then the engine-specific bit. For ChatGPT and Perplexity, off-site mentions carry a lot of weight, so reviews, listicles and genuine forum mentions matter more there. For AI Mode and AI Overviews, plain old Google rankings still do the heavy lifting.

This is where good search engine optimization services have changed the most in the last year. Same foundations, different finishing work per engine.

How Do I Check Whether AI Tools Are Citing My Site?

Low-tech answer first. Write down 20 or 30 questions your buyers genuinely ask, then once a month go and ask all three engines yourself and note who gets named. Keep each engine in its own column, don’t lump them. For visits, GA4 will show referrals from chatgpt.com and perplexity.ai, so you can see which mentions actually bring people in.

Manual, yes. An hour a month, a few logged-out browser windows. AI visibility tools can automate it once your list gets long.

Nothing fancy in the sheet. The prompt, the engine, who got named, whether you did, and which of your pages if so. Give it three months and you’ll spot it. One engine quite likes you, one couldn’t care less, and there’s always that one competitor who keeps turning up everywhere like a bad penny.

If you’re weighing up agencies offering the best search engine optimization services, ask to see this kind of tracking. If all they can show you is a Google rankings report, they’re measuring one window out of three.

Does ChatGPT Use Google Search Results, and Other Questions We Get Asked