Getting cited by AI assistants.
When someone asks ChatGPT for a recommendation in your category, a different set of rules decides whether your name comes up. Most sites fail at the first one — and it takes five minutes to fix.
Being on page one of Google is no longer the same thing as being recommended. When someone asks ChatGPT “who's the best plumber in Leeds?”, a different set of rules decides whether your name comes up. This is the highest-leverage page in this section — most sites fail at step one.
Why this matters now
AI assistants answer the question instead of listing ten links. If you're not in the answer, you don't get the click — there's no second page to be on. And unlike search, you can be invisible for a reason that has nothing to do with the quality of your site: you may simply have told the crawlers to go away without realising it.
1 · Unblock the AI crawlers
This is the number one reason a business is invisible to AI, and the easiest thing on this list to fix.
Plenty of sites — often via a security plugin or a well-meaning SEO checklist — block AI bots in robots.txt. If you block them, you cannot be cited. Not “ranked lower”. Cannot be cited.
Check yoursite.com/robots.txt for any of these being disallowed:
GPTBot // ChatGPT's crawler OAI-SearchBot // ChatGPT Search PerplexityBot // Perplexity ClaudeBot // Claude Google-Extended // Google's AI surfaces Bingbot // Bing, and Copilot behind it
If any are blocked, allow them:
User-agent: GPTBot Allow: / User-agent: OAI-SearchBot Allow: / User-agent: PerplexityBot Allow: / User-agent: ClaudeBot Allow: / User-agent: Google-Extended Allow: /
Your AI Visibility tab audits all six and tells you exactly which are blocked, with a copy-paste fix. It's a quarter of your AI access score.
One deliberate omission: we don't flag CCBot. That's Common Crawl — it feeds model training, not live retrieval. Blocking it doesn't stop you being cited, so blocking it is a perfectly reasonable choice and we won't nag you about it.
2 · Serve real HTML
If your homepage returns an empty shell and paints the content in with JavaScript, many AI crawlers see nothing at all. They're far less patient than Googlebot.
Test it: view source (not inspect element) and look for your actual words. If the page source is mostly <div id="root"></div> and a script tag, you have a problem.
The fix is server-side rendering or static generation — a platform-level change, and a real one. If you're on WordPress, Squarespace, Shopify or Webflow you're already fine. If you're on a custom React or Vue app, this is worth raising with whoever built it.
3 · Add Organization schema
Structured data is how a machine confirms you're a real business rather than a page that mentions one. Drop this in your <head>:
<script type="application/ld+json"> { "@context": "https://schema.org", "@type": "Organization", "name": "Your Business", "url": "https://yourbusiness.com", "logo": "https://yourbusiness.com/logo.png", "description": "What you do, in one sentence.", "sameAs": [ "https://linkedin.com/company/yourbusiness", "https://x.com/yourbusiness" ] } </script>
LocalBusiness or ProfessionalService work too, and are better if you serve a specific area.
4 · Make your content quotable
Being readable gets you considered. Being quotable gets you cited. We score your pages on five levers — each one is a concrete editing habit:
- Answer first. Open with a direct 40–60 word answer to the question in your heading, before any preamble. This one lever matters more than the rest combined, because it's the paragraph an assistant lifts.
- Use real statistics. Numbers, percentages, currency — and cite where they came from. A claim with a source is quotable; a claim without one is marketing.
- Quote someone. A blockquote, or a handful of outbound links to authoritative sources. Pages that cite get cited.
- Shape your headings as questions. “How much does a boiler service cost?” beats “Our Pricing”. Assistants match on the question. Note that “How It Works” doesn't count — it needs to be a real question.
- Keep it fresh. Content updated within the last six months scores full marks. Undated content isn't punished, but it isn't rewarded either — so put a date on it.
Every one of these five is baked into how BlogCraft writes. The Content Score in the editor is scoring exactly this — a locked answer block at the top, cited statistics, question-shaped H2s, FAQ schema. That's what it's for. Try it →
5 · Exist somewhere other than your own website
AI assistants cross-check. A business that only exists on its own domain looks thinner than one that turns up in reviews, discussions and video.
We check four places plus one:
- YouTube · G2 · Trustpilot · Reddit — do you show up where your rivals do?
- Wikidata — the machine-readable “does this entity exist?” register that AI engines query directly. Being absent here is a high-value, low-effort gap.
Measuring it
Open SEO & AI Visibility → AI Visibility and run a check. We ask ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Claude real questions about your category and count how often you're named against how often your rivals are.
Your score combines four things:
- Share of voice (45%) — are you actually being recommended?
- AI access (25%) — can the crawlers even reach you? (Steps 1–3 above.)
- Citability (15%) — is your content quotable? (Step 4.)
- Off-site footprint (15%) — do you exist elsewhere? (Step 5.)
The check needs at least one competitor on your brand — share-of-voice is a comparison, and with nobody to compare against there's nothing to measure.