How to get cited by ChatGPT, Perplexity and Claude — and check that you were

A model can read your page perfectly and still credit someone else. Citation is a separate contest from readability — it’s the assistant deciding which source is trustworthy enough to name. Win it and you get a stream of high-intent visitors who arrived pre-sold by a neutral third party. Lose it and your content quietly becomes uncredited training fodder for a competitor’s answer.

Here’s what actually earns the citation — and, just as important, how to know whether you got it.

1. Be the primary source, not the echo

Answer engines prefer to cite where a claim originates. If your page restates something already said in ten other places, you’re a weak citation candidate. Original data, first-hand testing, specific numbers, and named authors all signal “this is where the fact lives.” A benchmark you ran beats a paragraph summarizing benchmarks other people ran — every time.

2. Tell the engine how to credit you

Don’t make the model infer your name from a footer logo. Declare it:

<meta property="ai:cite_as" content="Craft & Quill">
<meta property="ai:summary" content="Independent pour-over ratio test, 2026">

ai:cite_as is the exact attribution string you want spoken. ai:summary is the one-line version of your claim the engine can repeat verbatim. Together they remove the two things that most often go wrong in an AI citation: the wrong name, and a garbled summary.

3. Hand the assistant a clean, neutral prompt

This is where AskThis does the work for you. When a visitor taps an AI-share button, we don’t just open ChatGPT — we open it with a source-citing prompt already built, one that names your page as the source and asks the assistant to cite it:

Summarize the method described on this page and cite the source: Craft & Quill (https://…).

Neutral, question-shaped, attribution baked in. A prompt stuffed with superlatives invites the model to hedge; a clean one earns a clean, trusting answer with your name in it. Every share becomes a seeded citation.

4. Check that it worked

The hard truth of AI citation is that it happens off your site, inside a chat window you can’t see. So the only honest way to run this is to measure it. Two loops:

• Mechanical: run the page through the free AI-Score audit to confirm nothing is blocking a citation — unreadable content, a missing cite_as, a robots.txt that locks AI crawlers out.
• Outcome: track which engines actually name you versus a competitor versus nobody. That’s what citation monitoring is for, and it’s the difference between “we optimized for AI” as a vibe and as a number you can move.

Close the loop

Getting cited isn’t a trick — it’s the same discipline as good SEO, pointed at a new judge: be the source, make attribution unambiguous, hand the assistant a clean prompt, and measure the result. Pick one page where you’re genuinely the primary source, tag it, put the widget on it, and watch the citations start showing up. Then do it again on the next one.