Can AI search engines cite your site?
Run 18 technical checks across crawler access, structured data, content structure, and performance. See exactly what is blocking ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity.
AI citation is when an AI assistant references your website as a source in its answer. AI visibility is the practice of making your site easy for those assistants to find, understand, and cite.
What is AI citation?
AI citation is when an AI assistant — ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, or Google's AI overviews — references your website as a source when answering someone's question. As buyers increasingly start research inside AI tools, being the cited source is becoming as valuable as ranking on the first page of Google.
Why AI visibility matters for startups
When a buyer asks an assistant "what's the best tool for X," the answer is assembled from sources the model can access and trusts. If your site is invisible or unreadable to those crawlers, you simply don't exist in that answer — no matter how good your product is. For startups competing against bigger brands, being clearly readable and citable is a rare place to win early.
What the checker looks for
The AI citation checker runs 18 technical checks across four areas — crawler access, structured data, content structure, and performance — and tells you exactly what's helping or blocking AI tools from understanding and citing your site, with fixes for each.
Content signals
- Direct, quotable answers near the top of each page.
- Clear H1/H2/H3 structure that maps to the questions buyers ask.
- FAQ-style content that AI can extract as discrete answers.
- Comparison and guide pages that match how people query assistants.
Technical signals
- Crawler access — AI bots aren't blocked in robots.txt and content isn't hidden behind scripts.
- Structured data (Article, FAQPage, Organization, Product) that makes meaning explicit.
- Clean, crawlable HTML and reasonable performance.
- Consistent brand information across your site and the web.
llms.txt and structured content
An llms.txt file gives AI crawlers a plain-language summary of your site and key pages, and structured data makes each page's meaning explicit. Neither guarantees a citation, but together they reduce the chance an AI misreads or overlooks you — and they're among the cheapest improvements to make.
How Distro helps with AI visibility and content planning
The checker shows you the gaps; Distro helps you close them. The Content Engine writes and publishes the answer-ready articles and comparison pages AI tools cite, works to get you cited in ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity, and surfaces the Search Console opportunities and directories worth submitting to for backlinks. AI visibility improves steadily alongside the rest of your customer acquisition.
Frequently asked questions
What is an AI citation checker?
It's a free tool that scans your website and runs technical checks across crawler access, structured data, content structure, and performance to tell you whether AI assistants like ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity can find, understand, and cite your site — and what to fix.
How do I get my website cited by ChatGPT?
Make your content crawlable, lead pages with direct quotable answers, add clear headings and structured data, publish comparison and guide pages that match buyer questions, and build authority through credible mentions. An llms.txt file and FAQ schema also help AI systems understand and extract your content.
Is the AI citation checker free?
Yes. Enter your URL and the checker runs 18 technical checks instantly, with no signup. You get a clear list of what's helping and what's blocking AI tools from citing your site, along with fixes.
Does blocking AI bots affect citations?
Yes. If your robots.txt or hosting blocks AI crawlers, those assistants can't read your content and won't cite it. The checker flags crawler-access issues so you can decide which bots to allow.
What's the difference between SEO and AI citation?
SEO focuses on ranking in traditional search results; AI citation focuses on being the source an assistant quotes in its answer. They overlap heavily — crawlable, clear, authoritative content helps both — but AI citation adds emphasis on direct answers and structured data.
Run a free growth and AI visibility check
Distro publishes the content AI tools cite and finds the buyers evaluating tools like yours. Start with a free report, no credit card.