When ChatGPT, Claude or Gemini answer with live web results, they search, read a handful of pages and cite the ones they used. Being cited is not a ranking you can buy. It is the result of being a page the assistant can read, that answers the question directly, and that other sources agree with.
1. Let the assistants read you
If robots.txt blocks OAI-SearchBot, ClaudeBot or PerplexityBot, those assistants cannot fetch your pages when they answer. Check your robots.txt for blanket Disallow rules, and decide deliberately which AI crawlers you allow. Blocking training crawlers such as GPTBot is a separate choice from blocking search crawlers.
2. Answer the question in the first paragraph
Assistants quote passages, not pages. A comparison page that states the answer up front ("X is a revenue forecasting tool for B2B sales teams; it differs from Y in...") is far easier to cite than one that opens with a hero banner and a slogan.
- Put the category and the audience in one plain sentence near the top.
- Publish pricing, integrations and limits as text, not only in images.
- Give each important question its own page or clearly headed section.
3. Describe yourself in structured data
Schema.org Organization, Product or SoftwareApplication markup tells crawlers what the page is about in a form they do not have to guess. Add it to your homepage and product pages, and keep it consistent with the visible text.
4. Be corroborated by people other than you
Assistants lean on comparison articles, documentation, community threads and reviews. If the only page that describes your product is your own, the answer will often cite someone else's description instead. Make sure independent pages describe you accurately, and correct the ones that do not.
5. Measure the answers, not just the traffic
Referral analytics only catch clicks. Track the questions your buyers ask, read what each assistant actually answers, and watch mention rate, citation share and position over time. Threadly does this across ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini, and the free AI readiness audit on our homepage checks the crawlability basics in under a minute.