Free guide · 10 min read

How to start getting your site cited by AI in 2027

The 7 steps I'd take today, from zero, to get a small site quoted by ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google's AI Overviews and Copilot.

Aziz
Aziz
Builds ProgSEO ·
Pencil sketch of a man with a laptop; an orange arrow leads to an AI chat answer where one source card is circled

I build ProgSEO, a tool that writes SEO articles. Lately most of my week goes into one question: why does ChatGPT quote one site and completely ignore another?

This is the plan I'd follow if I had a small site and zero AI citations today. No magic tricks. Seven steps, most of them boring, all of them doable this month.

How to use it: read it once, then tick the checklist at the end as you go.

1. See who AI quotes today5 min

A man inspects a laptop through a magnifying glass; one source in an AI answer's source list is circled in orange

Before fixing anything, find out who gets quoted instead of you. Open ChatGPT (search on), Perplexity and Google's AI Mode. Ask each the same three questions:

3 prompts — replace the [brackets]
What's the best [your service or product] for [your customer] in [your city or country]?

How much does [your service] cost in [your city or country] in 2026?

[The question customers ask you every single week]

Under each answer, write down the sites in the sources. Those are your real competitors in AI search, and they're often not the ones you see on Google. Across 15,000 queries, only 12% of the pages AI assistants cited ranked in Google's top 10 for the same query (Ahrefs, 2025).

That's the good news for a small site: ranking #1 on Google isn't the entry ticket.

2. Let the AI crawlers in10 min

A man holds a garden gate open for small robot crawlers walking to a house; a settings panel shows a bot access toggle circled

A page an AI search bot can't fetch can't be cited. Two places block bots without you knowing: your robots.txt and your CDN.

  • Open yoursite.com/robots.txt. Look for OAI-SearchBot (ChatGPT search), PerplexityBot, Bingbot and Googlebot. If one sits under Disallow: /, that engine can't quote you. OpenAI says changes take about 24 hours to apply (OpenAI docs).
  • GPTBot is a different bot. It collects training data. You can block GPTBot and still allow OAI-SearchBot.
  • On Cloudflare? Open its AI crawler / bot settings. Cloudflare changed its defaults in July 2025 and again in September 2026.

What I found on my own site

progseo.dev sits behind Cloudflare. On September 30, 2026 I requested a page pretending to be OAI-SearchBot, PerplexityBot, GPTBot and ClaudeBot. All four got a normal 200. Run the same check on your site from a Mac or Linux terminal:
Terminal — replace YOURSITE.com
for bot in OAI-SearchBot PerplexityBot GPTBot ClaudeBot; do
  printf "%s: " $bot
  curl -s -o /dev/null -w "%{http_code}\n" \
    -A "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; $bot)" https://YOURSITE.com/
done

A 403 or a challenge page means that bot is blocked. It's a quick check, not proof: Cloudflare can treat the real bots, coming from their known IP addresses, differently from a borrowed name.

3. Get into Bing15 min

Everyone checks Google and forgets Bing. Microsoft Copilot builds its answers on Bing's index, and since February 2026 Bing shows you how often Copilot cites your pages (Bing Webmaster Blog, 2026).

  • Add your site to Bing Webmaster Tools. You can import it from Google Search Console in a few clicks.
  • Submit your sitemap.
  • Turn on IndexNow if your CMS supports it, so new pages reach Bing right after you publish.
  • Open the AI Performance report. It's your free citation counter.

4. Make one page quotable30 min

AI doesn't quote a vibe. It quotes a sentence. Pick your most important page and check four things:

  • The answer sits in the first two sentences under each heading, not in paragraph five.
  • Real specifics: prices or ranges, places, dates, numbers with a source.
  • One question per section, and the question is the heading.
  • A visible "updated" date and a real person as the author.
Example · a plumber's page (numbers are illustrative)

Before: "We offer high-quality plumbing solutions tailored to your needs."

After: "Replacing a 50-gallon water heater in Austin costs $1,400–$2,600 installed, and most jobs take one day."

What I'd skip: llms.txt files and special "AI schema". Google says you don't need new machine-readable files or markup to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode (Google Search Central).

5. Answer the questions AI getsongoing

A man adds a page to a tall stack while question bubbles link to pages; a content calendar with one article per day

This is the step that makes the difference, and the one most people quit. People ask AI long, specific questions. One page answers one of them. A site with 40 such pages has 40 chances to be quoted. A site with a homepage and a "Services" page has almost none.

  • List 30 questions from your step 1 prompts, sales calls, inbox and Google's "People also ask".
  • Start where the current sources are weak: an old forum thread, a thin listicle, a page from 2022. Those are the ones you can win.
  • Publish at least one a week, and update old ones when the facts change.

Honest math: a researched article that answers one question well takes roughly 2–3 hours by hand. Thirty of them is a month of evenings. You can do it with the list above. Or ProgSEO can find the keywords you can win and write one researched, fact-checked article a day. That's the part I built it for.

Try it free: 3 articles, no card →

6. Get mentioned where AI looks1 h / week

This one surprised me most. In a study of 75,000 brands, how often a brand was mentioned across the web correlated with AI Overview visibility at 0.664. Backlinks: 0.218 (Ahrefs, 2025). Correlation, not proof. But it matches what you'll see in step 1: AI loves Reddit threads, "best of" lists and review sites.

  • Answer two real questions a week on Reddit or a niche forum, as yourself. Help first, and link only when it truly helps.
  • Find the "best [category]" lists from your step 1 sources. Email the author with something new they can add.
  • Ask happy customers for reviews on the sites AI quoted in step 1.

7. Measure it10 min

  • Google Analytics 4: Reports → Acquisition → Traffic acquisition, then search "chatgpt". ChatGPT adds utm_source=chatgpt.com to the links it cites (OpenAI Help Center). Check perplexity.ai and copilot too.
  • Bing Webmaster Tools → AI Performance for Copilot citations.
  • Put the step 1 prompts in your calendar for the first of every month, and note who gets quoted.

Why bother? In Seer Interactive's data (5.47M queries, Jan 2025–Feb 2026), brands cited in an AI Overview got 120% more organic clicks per impression than when they weren't cited (Seer Interactive, 2026). They're clear it's a correlation, but it's the best number we have.

Your checklist

Tick as you go. It saves on this device, so you can come back to it.

0 of 7 done

ProgSEO

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Step 5 is the one that compounds, and the one that eats your evenings. ProgSEO finds keywords you can win, writes researched, fact-checked articles and plans a month of them, one a day.

  • 3 days free, up to 3 real articles
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Stuck on a step? Reply to the DM that brought you here, or use the chat on this page. I read every one. — Aziz

Sources

Made by ProgSEO. This guide is general information, not a guarantee of rankings, citations or traffic. Last updated September 2026.

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