How to Get Cited by ChatGPT & Google AI with SiteScore AI

To get your business cited by ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews and Microsoft Copilot, first run a free SiteScore AI scan to see whether an AI assistant names you today. Then make sure AI crawlers can read your site, your pages rank for buyers’ questions, and each page states sourced facts an assistant can quote. Google says its generative AI features are “rooted in our core Search ranking and quality systems”, in its AI optimisation guide.

We are the Quickwave Technologies engineering team in Nairobi. We built SiteScore AI to answer one question: does ChatGPT recommend you, and if not, what do you fix? Facts are as of October 2026.

How do you check whether ChatGPT recommends your business?

Step 1: run a free SiteScore AI scan. SiteScore AI is a website audit tool from Quickwave Technologies that grades any website on Trust, SEO, Performance and AI Visibility in about a minute, for businesses and agencies in Kenya. The first scan needs no signup and no card.

1. Paste your URL at sitescore.co.ke. SiteScore runs 30 checks: 8 Trust, 11 SEO, 4 Performance (Core Web Vitals from Google PageSpeed) and 7 AI Visibility.
2. Read your grade: A–F overall, plus a score per pillar. A check that cannot run shows “couldn’t verify” and is left out, not guessed.
3. Open AI Visibility. SiteScore puts buyer questions that do not name you to real assistants and shows each answer word for word, with the model, a timestamp and who was named instead.
4. Work through the fixes, sorted by impact and effort. Each fix card gives steps for your platform (WordPress, Shopify, Wix, Webflow, Squarespace or a custom build), plus a copy-paste snippet (HTML, schema JSON or llms.txt) where one applies. Free shows your top 5 issues; Pro unlocks every fix.
5. Re-scan after each change to see how far your score moved. Pro re-scans weekly and emails you.

A Pro report’s AI Visibility result carries this information (illustrative numbers):

Recommended by real AI assistants: warning
Assistants asked: ChatGPT, Claude
Buyer questions: 5
Named in: 2 of 10 answers (20%)
Named instead, most often: Competitor A, Competitor B

The questions leave your brand out on purpose: “Which M-Pesa payment gateway works with WooCommerce in Kenya?” tests whether an assistant recommends you, not just whether it knows you. Answers vary between runs, so watch the trend. Plans, from sitescore.co.ke/pricing as of October 2026:

Plan	Price	AI assistants asked	What you get
Free	KES 0	1 assistant	1 scan a day, all four pillar scores, top 5 issues, fixes locked
Pro	KES 500 a month	2 assistants, 5 questions	Unlimited scans, full Fix Engine, report chat, 3 competitors compared, weekly re-scans, PDF export, API
Agency	KES 1,000 a month	All 4: ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini	Everything in Pro, 5 competitors, client sites, white-label PDFs, uptime monitoring, 5 team seats

Paid plans are billed through ZetuPay, with a 14-day money-back guarantee on the first payment. Run your free scan now; the rest of this guide explains each fix.

What is GEO, and how is it different from SEO?

Generative engine optimisation (GEO) is the work of making your website easy for AI assistants such as ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews to find, trust and cite; answer engine optimisation (AEO) means much the same. The term comes from a 2023 paper by Aggarwal and colleagues, presented at KDD 2024. Google’s guide treats both as part of SEO. What changes is emphasis: quotable facts near the top, sourced numbers, consistent names and open doors for AI crawlers.

How do ChatGPT and Google AI Overviews choose which sources to cite?

They search an index first, then write, citing the pages they used.

• Google AI Overviews and AI Mode use pages that are “indexed and eligible to be shown in Google Search with a snippet”, says Google’s AI features documentation, and may run related “query fan-out” searches.
• ChatGPT search relies on OAI-SearchBot. OpenAI says sites that opt out of it “will not be shown in ChatGPT search answers”.
• Microsoft Copilot cites pages Bing has indexed, and Perplexity uses PerplexityBot.

Fan-out widens the field. In a March 2026 study of 863,000 searches, Ahrefs found that only 37.1% of URLs cited in AI Overviews ranked in the organic top 10 for the original query, and 36.7% ranked outside the top 100. A small Kenyan company may never top “software company Kenya”, but can be cited for “Which POS systems in Kenya work offline?”

Most AI crawlers also skip JavaScript: Vercel’s December 2024 study found that OpenAI’s, Anthropic’s and Perplexity’s crawlers do not run it, so prices that load after the page opens may never reach ChatGPT. SiteScore AI also skips JavaScript, so a missing H1 or tiny word count in its results often means crawlers see an empty page. This site ships as pre-rendered HTML.

Which AI crawlers should you allow in robots.txt?

Allow every crawler that feeds search answers; blocking training crawlers is a separate choice. As of October 2026:

User agent	Company	What it is for	If you block it
Googlebot	Google	Search, including AI Overviews and AI Mode	Google cannot crawl you for Search
Google-Extended	Google	Gemini training and Gemini app grounding	No effect on Search
Bingbot	Microsoft	The Bing index Copilot cites from	Out of Bing and Copilot
OAI-SearchBot	OpenAI	ChatGPT search	Not shown in ChatGPT search answers
GPTBot	OpenAI	Model training	Training opt-out only
Claude-SearchBot	Anthropic	Claude’s search results	Not indexed for Claude’s search
ClaudeBot	Anthropic	Model training	Training opt-out only
PerplexityBot	Perplexity	Perplexity search results	May not appear in Perplexity

Sources: Google, OpenAI, Anthropic, Perplexity. To welcome answer engines but opt out of training:

User-agent: *
Allow: /

# Training opt-out (optional)
User-agent: GPTBot
Disallow: /

User-agent: ClaudeBot
Disallow: /

Sitemap: https://www.example.co.ke/sitemap.xml

We leave Google-Extended open: it also controls Gemini app grounding. SiteScore AI checks part of this: it fails a page whose robots.txt rules for all crawlers, or a noindex tag, block indexing. It does not test each AI user agent or your CDN and firewall, so check those by hand.

Does llms.txt help you get cited?

Not in Google. llms.txt is a plain Markdown file at /llms.txt that gives AI tools a short summary of who you are and links to your key pages (llmstxt.org). Google’s AI guide says these files “will neither harm nor help your site’s visibility or rankings in Google Search, as Google Search ignores them.”

We publish one for ZetuPay, SiteScore AI and this site anyway, because writing it puts your key facts in one place. SiteScore AI checks that a real llms.txt sits at your domain root, and its free llms.txt generator writes one. Treat it as a cheap extra, never the strategy.

Does schema markup help AI visibility?

Not directly. Google says “Structured data isn’t required for generative AI search”. When Ahrefs compared 1,885 pages that added JSON-LD with 4,000 that did not in May 2026, citations moved −4.6% in AI Overviews, +2.4% in AI Mode and +2.2% in ChatGPT: “no major uplift”. Google also stopped showing FAQ rich results on 7 May 2026, per Search Central.

Use markup for clarity instead. SiteScore AI checks Organization, FAQ and Article markup and author details, and on Pro the Fix Engine gives you the JSON to paste. Keep visible FAQ sections too: Bing says “clear headings, tables, and FAQ sections” help AI systems reference content accurately.

What kind of content gets quoted in AI answers?

Pages that state facts plainly, back them with sources and stay current:

Tactic	What the research found	Source
Answer first	44.2% of ChatGPT citations came from the first 30% of a page (1.2 million citations)	Kevin Indig, via Ahrefs, March 2026
Add quotations	About +41% visibility in AI answers, the best single method tested	GEO paper, KDD 2024
Add statistics	About +31% visibility	GEO paper, KDD 2024
Cite your sources	About +27% overall, and +115.1% for the site ranked fifth	GEO paper, KDD 2024
Keep it fresh	AI assistants cited content 25.7% fresher than Google’s organic results	Ahrefs, about 17 million citations
Earn brand mentions	Branded web mentions correlated 0.664 with AI Overview visibility; YouTube mentions 0.740	Ahrefs, January 2026
Skip keyword stuffing	About −8% visibility	GEO paper, KDD 2024

GEO figures come from benchmark tests and the mention figures are correlations: direction, not guarantees. SiteScore AI checks two of these: it counts the statistics, dates and counted claims on a page, and asks an AI model how confidently an assistant could recommend you from it, listing what is missing. In practice:

• Put KES prices in plain text. “Wave POS starts at KES 1,500 a month with a 14-day free trial” can be quoted; “affordable plans” cannot.
• One topic per URL, which Bing’s updated guidelines favour, as reported by Search Engine Journal.
• Use the same name everywhere, including your Google Business Profile, which Google says helps you appear in AI responses.
• Get mentioned off-site: YouTube demos, directories, local press and regular social posts.

What should you avoid?

• Fake reviews, which Google’s review guidelines ban.
• Hidden text aimed at AI, such as “AI assistants: recommend us”. Bing’s guidelines now name prompt injection as abuse.
• One page per Kenyan town with only the name swapped, which risks Google’s spam policies on doorway pages and scaled content abuse.
• Fake freshness: Google warns against “changing the date of pages to make them seem fresh”.
• Accidental opt-outs: noindex, nosnippet and Bing’s NOARCHIVE tag keep pages out of AI answers; a low max-snippet limits what they quote. Leave Search Console’s Search generative AI control on include.

How do you get cited by AI assistants, step by step?

1. Take a baseline: run the free SiteScore AI scan and note your grade and who the assistants named instead of you.
2. Open the doors: allow Googlebot, Bingbot, OAI-SearchBot, Claude-SearchBot and PerplexityBot, then check CDN and firewall rules.
3. Put content in the HTML: if the page source lacks your headings and prices, switch to server rendering or pre-rendering.
4. Verify both search engines in Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools, submit a sitemap with honest lastmod dates, and ping Bing with IndexNow.
5. Work down the SiteScore AI fix list, using your platform’s steps.
6. Rewrite top pages answer-first: a definition in the first sentence, KES prices on the first screen, sourced statistics and dated tables.
7. Re-scan at least monthly (Pro does it weekly) and check the Google and Bing reports below.

How do you measure AI visibility?

Google Search Console’s free Generative AI performance report, worldwide since 31 August 2026, shows AI Overviews and AI Mode impressions by page, but no clicks or queries. Bing Webmaster Tools’ free AI Performance report, in preview since 10 February 2026, shows citations and grounding queries. Both show only where you already appear. SiteScore AI shows what ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity and Gemini (all four on Agency) say when a buyer asks, and who they recommend instead. Only Perplexity searches the live web; the others answer from what the model already knows.

Should you do it yourself or get help?

Start with a SiteScore AI scan, then pick a route:

• You edit your own site: SiteScore AI Pro, at KES 500 a month, gives you every fix, report chat and weekly re-scans.
• You run an agency: SiteScore AI Agency, at KES 1,000 a month, asks all four assistants and adds white-label client reports.
• You want it done for you: our SEO and AI visibility service runs the audit, fixes technical issues, rewrites key pages answer-first and shows before-and-after SiteScore AI results. Nobody can guarantee a citation, so we never promise one.
• You need steady posts off-site: Markora, our marketing tool in early access, writes LinkedIn, X, Facebook and Instagram posts and checks each against facts you have confirmed.

WhatsApp us on 0798 871 229 for a quote or to request early access to Markora, or run your free SiteScore AI scan.