SEO & AI
Am I cited by ChatGPT? 5 ways to check
Classic SEO is measured in Google Search Console. But your visibility in the answers of ChatGPT, Perplexity or Gemini? No official dashboard. Here are five concrete ways to know whether — and how — AI talks about you.
You've polished your SEO, you track your Google positions. But a growing share of searches now ends in an assistant's answer, with no click. The real question is no longer just "do I show up on Google?", but "does the AI cite me?". Bad news: there's no official dashboard. Good news: you can reconstruct the answer.
1. Ask the assistants directly
The simplest method. Turn on ChatGPT's search mode, open Perplexity and Gemini, and ask the questions you should appear for: your brand, your product category, the problems you solve. Note whether you're cited, and with which page as source.
Limit: answers aren't deterministic — they vary by wording, history and user. Test several variants, several days, in a private window.
2. Read your server logs
If AI bots never come to read you, you can't be cited. Search your logs for the user-agents OAI-SearchBot, ChatGPT-User, PerplexityBot, ClaudeBot. Their absence is a diagnosis in itself: check your robots.txt (see should you block AI crawlers?) and the accessibility of your HTML.
3. Test ChatGPT Search and Perplexity on your key pages
Beyond your brand, take your five strategic pages and phrase the query each one answers. Does the assistant cite your page, a competitor's, or nothing? It's the measure closest to users' real intent.
4. Watch your "AI chat" referrers
When someone clicks a link from an AI answer, the visit arrives with a referrer: chatgpt.com, perplexity.ai, gemini.google.com. An analytics that isolates these referrers gives you the real traffic from assistants — distinct from crawlers, which aren't visitors. Snorklee, for one, explicitly separates "AI crawlers" (bots) and "visits from AI chats" (humans).
5. Use a diagnostic tool
To automate part of these checks, our free AI-visibility checker analyses your pages technically: AI crawler access, clean HTML, structured data, signals assistants weigh. It doesn't replace the manual test, but it quickly spots what makes you unreadable to an AI.
There's no "Search Console for AI": visibility is reconstructed by cross-checking. The bare minimum is to be readable — crawlers allowed, clean HTML — before hoping to be cited. The rest is earned through quality and mentions elsewhere.
And then?
Being readable is necessary but not sufficient. The structuring of your answers matters too: that's the point of FAQPage markup, which presents your questions and answers in a format machines extract without guessing.
How do I know if ChatGPT cites my site?
Ask ChatGPT (search mode on) questions where you should appear and look at the cited sources; check whether OAI-SearchBot visits in your logs; and watch visits whose referrer is chatgpt.com. A diagnostic tool automates part of these checks.
Does appearing in Google guarantee being cited by AI?
No. The overlap between top Google results and the sources cited by AI is weak. Ranking well helps, but assistants select and rephrase by their own criteria.
Is there a Search Console for AI?
No official equivalent so far. AI visibility is reconstructed by cross-checking: manual prompts, server logs of AI crawlers, traffic referrers and diagnostic tools.
Is traffic from AI measurable?
Yes, partly: when a human clicks a link from ChatGPT or Perplexity, the visit carries a referrer (chatgpt.com, perplexity.ai). An analytics that distinguishes these referrers shows the traffic really coming from AI chats.
Published June 2026. AI bot names and behaviours change fast; check the publishers' documentation before freezing a configuration. General information, not individualised advice.