When a person asks ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, or Gemini a question, the assistant answers from sources it can read and trust. Getting cited means being one of those sources. A site is cited when the assistant can reach its content, read it cheaply, confirm the facts, and find corroboration elsewhere. This guide covers what that takes.
Be readable, not just rendered
An assistant that does not run JavaScript sees an empty shell where a client-rendered page should be. The first requirement is that the content arrives in the response: a prerendered or static page, a markdown form served through content negotiation, and an llms.txt that maps the site. A page an assistant cannot read is a page it cannot cite.
State your facts as data
Prose can be summarized wrongly. JSON-LD states the facts of a page, such as the organization, the service, and the price, as data an assistant reads without inference. Structured data also ties a page to an entity an assistant already knows, which is why a Wikidata item and consistent sameAs links raise the odds that the assistant attributes the content to the right source.
