How to Get Your Site Cited by ChatGPT and Perplexity

Somewhere in the last two years, a chunk of your potential readers stopped googling. They ask ChatGPT "what's the best email tool for a small list," Perplexity "Surfer vs Semrush for a small site," Claude "cheap HubSpot alternatives" — and they act on the answer without visiting a results page. For a small site this is terrifying or wonderful, depending on one thing: whether the machines cite you.

We rebuilt this site with LLM citation as an explicit goal. Here's what that means in practice — no tricks, because there aren't any.

What actually gets cited

Ask the assistants your own money questions and study the sources they surface. Patterns emerge fast:

Structured comparison beats prose. A table with tools, prices and verdicts is extractable; eight paragraphs of narrative aren't. When an LLM assembles an answer about "best X," it's effectively quoting whoever laid out the facts most machine-readably.

Dated, specific facts beat vague authority. "From $49/month (checked August 2026)" is citable — it's a claim with a timestamp the model can weigh. "Affordable pricing" is noise. This is why every price on our pages carries its check date; it started as an honesty rule and turned out to be an AI-visibility rule.

Stated methodology beats implied expertise. "We bought all three tools and ran the same campaign through them" gives an answer engine a reason to prefer you it can articulate to the user. Several of our pages exist in AI answers specifically as "according to a site that tested them."

Direct answers near the question. FAQ blocks with real questions phrased the way people ask them ("What does ActiveCampaign really cost at 10,000 contacts?") map one-to-one to prompts. Schema markup (FAQ, ItemList) doesn't hurt; the visible structure matters more.

What doesn't work

• Keyword-stuffed "AI SEO" pages. The models summarize meaning, not strings.
• Volume without a niche. LLMs cite the specific source: "for solo marketers," "for small sites, not enterprise." The qualifier that makes a Google keyword winnable is the same one that makes you the citable answer for that sliver.
• Blocking crawlers, then wondering. Check your robots setup — some sites accidentally block the very bots they want citations from.

How to measure it (free)

No dashboard needed to start: monthly, ask each major assistant 5–10 of your money questions in a fresh session and note who's cited. Watch your analytics for referrals from the answer engines (Perplexity in particular sends real clicks). And keep Search Console open next to it — Google's AI Overviews draw on similar signals, so the work compounds across both.

The paid suites are racing to add "AI visibility" tracking — our Surfer vs Semrush comparison covers where that stands — but honestly, for a small site the monthly manual check tells you what you need.

The mindset shift

Classic SEO optimized for being ranked. This optimizes for being quoted — and you get quoted by being the clearest, most checkable source for one narrow question. Which, conveniently, is identical to just being trustworthy. Every page structure we use for this is visible on our own money pages (here's one — note the table, the dates, the methodology box). Steal the pattern; the machines don't care who did it first, only who did it clearest.