Skip to content
visible4ai
E-E-A-T CheckerLearnAI File GeneratorPricing
en|
Sign inAccount
visible4ai
E-E-A-T CheckerLearnBlogAI File GeneratorPricingContact
PrivacyTermsRefundsImprintCancel contracts hereWithdraw from contract

Featured on Product Hunt

© 2026 visible4ai. A product of Siempi AG.

We measure whether AI tools cite your website and show you how to improve.

Back to blog

How to check whether ChatGPT, Perplexity or Gemini cite your website

Four ways to find out if AI answers name your site, from asking the tools the right questions to reading your server logs for their crawlers, and what to change if the answer is no.

Saurav Chamoli·10 November 2026·4 min read

The quickest check: open ChatGPT, Perplexity and Gemini, ask each the five questions a customer would ask before buying from you, and read whether your domain appears in the answer or its sources. Do it with web search turned on, in the language your customers use. Fifteen minutes gives you a first answer; the other three methods below tell you whether it is representative.

AI assistants with web access do not rank pages the way Google does. They retrieve a handful of sources per question, write one answer, and cite some of those sources, sometimes inline, sometimes in a list at the end. Either you are in that handful or you are not. There is no page two. That is why "are we cited" has replaced "where do we rank" as the question worth asking, and why it is worth checking properly rather than once.

1. Ask the tools yourself

Write down the questions, not the keywords. A customer does not type "fiduciary Zurich" into ChatGPT; they type "which fiduciary in Zurich is good for a small GmbH with 10 employees". Five of those, in the language your customers use, is a realistic sample.

Then, for each tool:

  • ChatGPT: make sure search is on (the globe icon, or a model that browses). Ask. Expand the sources panel; inline citations are not the full list.
  • Perplexity: searches by default. Sources are numbered above the answer; check each.
  • Gemini: ask, then use "double-check" or look for the source chips under the answer.
  • Claude: with web search enabled, sources appear as footnotes.

Record three things per answer: were you cited, who was, and what the answer actually said about the topic. The third one is the useful one. If every tool answers "it depends, look for someone with these qualifications" and names nobody, you are not losing to a competitor; you are losing to a vacuum, and a page that answers the question directly can fill it.

The weakness of this method is that one person's session on one day is one sample. Answers change between runs, between accounts and between weeks.

2. Read your server logs for their crawlers

Before an assistant can cite you, something has to fetch your pages. The major operators identify their crawlers by user agent, and the names are public: GPTBot and OAI-SearchBot (OpenAI), PerplexityBot, ClaudeBot and Claude-SearchBot (Anthropic), Google-Extended (Google's AI training opt-out token; Gemini's grounding uses the ordinary Googlebot index). If none of them appears in your logs, nothing you publish is reaching them, and the first fix is access, not content. Check robots.txt has not blocked them by accident; some CMS and CDN presets did in 2024.

If they are fetching, note pages. Crawlers spending their visits on your tag archive and not your service pages is a structure problem you can fix in a day.

Written by

Saurav Chamoli

Builds visible4ai at Siempi AG and writes about the technical side of being read by AI systems: crawlers, files, markup.

More from the blog

  • 12 November 2026 · 7 min read

    On 10 November OpenAI opened Business Hub: claim your company in ChatGPT, keep its details current, add a product feed, and see how often ChatGPT cites your website. Open wherever ChatGPT is available and the verification is supported; we are testing it with our own site. What launched, the five steps, and what is US-only or missing.

    Mauro Miotti

  • 10 November 2026 · 3 min read

    Swiss SMEs keep their best content in PDFs: price lists, product sheets, the 40-page company brochure. AI answer engines mostly skip them. Why that is, and the two-hour job that fixes it.

    Saurav Chamoli

  • 10 November 2026 · 3 min read

    Swiss and German law makes you publish who you are. That obligation happens to produce exactly the page answer engines use to decide whether a company is real. Seven lines that turn a legal footer into a trust signal.

which

3. Look for referral traffic

When a reader clicks a citation, the visit shows up in your analytics with the assistant's domain as referrer: chatgpt.com, perplexity.ai, gemini.google.com, claude.ai. The numbers will be small; the point is whether they are zero. A segment for those referrers, checked monthly, is the cheapest lasting measurement you can set up. Google's AI Overviews are the exception: those clicks arrive as ordinary Google search traffic, and Search Console does not break them out.

4. Use a checker that asks on your behalf

The first method is right but does not scale, and the second and third tell you about access and clicks, not about citations. A checker that sends the same customer questions to the tools' APIs, records which answers name your domain, and repeats the run on a schedule turns a one-off reading into a trend. The free analysis on this site does one run across four tools; the paid plans repeat it and show you who was cited instead.

If the answer is no

Three things move the needle, in order of effort:

  1. Answer the question on the page. First paragraph, plain words, the customer's phrasing. Assistants quote the passage that answers the question; a page that opens with a welcome has nothing to quote.
  2. Be a named source. Author, date, credentials, and a profile elsewhere that confirms them. Assistants, like search quality raters, prefer a person with a track record to a brand voice.
  3. Be mentioned elsewhere. The AirOps analysis of AI citations found brands 6.5 times more likely to be mentioned through third-party pages than through their own. One directory listing or trade-press mention is worth more than another page on your site.

Then ask the same five questions again in a month. For what the engines do between your page and their answer, see How AI search works.

Mauro Miotti

ChatGPT now lets you claim your business. What to do this week, and what not to expect
Your PDF brochure is invisible to AI assistants. Here is what to do with it
Your Impressum is the most trusted page on your site. AI assistants read it too