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.
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.
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.
An assistant is more likely to cite a claim it can confirm in more than one place. A site that only references itself is weaker than one that independent sources also describe. Open-source code, a public company record, listings in directories an assistant trusts, and genuine third-party mentions all raise confidence. The signal is consistency across sources, not volume.
Several assistants retrieve through a search index before they answer. If a site is not indexed where the assistant looks, it cannot be cited regardless of quality. Submitting URLs through the index protocols a site supports, and keeping the sitemap and llms.txt current, is how new content reaches that layer.
Whether a site is cited is observable. Ask the assistants the questions a buyer would ask and record which sources they name. Repeat on a schedule. The sources that appear, and the ones that do not, tell you where the work is. turva.dev runs this check monthly against its own queries.
For an audit of how legible and citable a site is to assistants, contact [info@turva.dev](mailto:info@turva.dev).
*Originally published at https://turva.dev/guides/get-cited-by-ai-assistants*