Scoring and testing work together. A good GEO Score is 80 or above, and the rules behind every point are on the GEO Score page and in the methodology. A score is not a guarantee of citation, so check whether ChatGPT cites your website as well.
How do you check ChatGPT citations by hand?
Checking ChatGPT citations by hand takes five steps, using the same 10 to 20 buyer questions each time you run the check. A buyer question is a question a customer asks before choosing a supplier, phrased without your brand name.
- Write 10 to 20 buyer questions. Use the words a customer would type, such as "best payroll software for a 10-person restaurant", not your brand name.
- Ask each one in ChatGPT with search on. Use a fresh chat each time, so earlier messages do not steer the answer.
- Open the sources. Note whether your domain is cited, which page, and which competitors appear instead.
- Repeat the questions in Perplexity and Google AI Mode. Each engine picks sources differently. Perplexity's bot guide says that "PerplexityBot is designed to surface and link websites in search results on Perplexity."
- Check referral traffic. In Google Analytics or any analytics tool, filter sessions by the sources chatgpt.com, perplexity.ai and gemini.google.com.
Why does one ChatGPT check prove so little?
One ChatGPT check proves little because AI answers change from run to run. The same question can cite different pages depending on its wording, the user's location, whether they are signed in, and when the engine last crawled. What matters is your citation rate, which according to the GeoTest glossary is "the percentage of category-relevant prompts that surface a site as a cited source." Being cited matters more than it used to: Pew Research Center data from 2025 shows users clicked a link inside a Google AI summary in just 1% of visits, so the name in the answer is often the whole impression. The same study of 900 people found that 58% ran at least one Google search in 2025 that produced an AI summary.
| One manual check | A tracked citation panel | |
|---|---|---|
| Questions | Whatever you think of that day | The same 10 to 20 buyer questions every run |
| Engines | Usually ChatGPT only | ChatGPT, Perplexity and Gemini |
| Result | Cited or not cited, once | A citation rate you can compare month to month |
| Tells you | That the page can be cited | Whether a fix changed how often it is cited |
What should you check if ChatGPT never cites you?
If ChatGPT never cites you, check three technical causes before you rewrite anything, because any one of them can hide a good page.
- robots.txt. OpenAI's crawler documentation says "OAI-SearchBot is used to surface websites in search results in ChatGPT's search features", so blocking it removes you from ChatGPT search. OpenAI adds that "For search results, please note it can take ~24 hours from a site’s robots.txt update for our systems to adjust."
- Server HTML. If your text only appears after JavaScript runs, the crawler may see an empty page. A Vercel analysis of 569 million GPTBot requests in 2024 found no sign that AI crawlers execute JavaScript; server-rendered text is text present in the HTML before any script runs.
- The page itself. Does it answer the question in its first sentences, with facts worth quoting? A free Quick Scan scores this in about 15 seconds.
Which questions should you test for ChatGPT citations?
The questions to test for ChatGPT citations are the ones buyers ask before they choose a supplier, written without your brand name. Brand questions show what ChatGPT knows about you; buyer questions show whether it recommends you to people who have never heard of you. Those questions are now often asked of a chatbot first: G2's Answer Economy research, published in 2026, found that 71% of B2B software buyers rely on AI chatbots for software research.
Why does a ChatGPT citation matter if few people click?
A ChatGPT citation matters even when few people click, because the name in the answer is often the whole impression. Similarweb data shows zero-click searches rose from 56% to 69% between May 2024 and May 2025, and an ALM Corp analysis reports that 83% of searches end without a click when AI Overviews appear, and 93% in AI Mode. A brand cited in the answer is seen even in a search that sends no visit.
Does Claude cite websites the same way as ChatGPT?
Claude finds websites with its own search crawler, separate from OpenAI's, so a page can be cited in ChatGPT and not in Claude, or the other way round. Anthropic's crawler help article says "Claude-SearchBot navigates the web to improve search result quality for users." Anthropic's crawlers are active: a Vercel analysis counted 370 million requests from Anthropic's crawler across its network in one month in 2024, against 569 million from GPTBot.
How long after a fix should you test ChatGPT citations again?
A fix shows up in ChatGPT citations only after OpenAI's crawler reads the page again, so test ChatGPT citations again after the next crawl, not the same hour. For robots.txt changes, OpenAI gives a figure of about 24 hours. Content changes have no published timing, which is why a monthly panel works better than daily checks: paid GeoTest plans include one AI citation test per tracked site each calendar month, and a Quick Scan confirms the fix itself in about 15 seconds.
How do you track ChatGPT citations at scale?
Tracking ChatGPT citations at scale means running the same panel of questions on a schedule and recording the sources each time. A GeoTest Site Analysis does this for you: it asks your buyer questions live in ChatGPT and Perplexity, both searching the web, checks what Gemini already knows about you without searching, and reports which sources each engine cited. Paid plans include a monthly number of citation test questions per site, so you can rerun the same panel after each fix and see whether the rate moves. Google's guidance on AI features, updated in 2025, notes that sites appearing in AI features "are included in the overall search traffic in Search Console", so check that data too.
