ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews increasingly answer questions directly. Before an AI tool can cite your page, it has to reach it, be allowed to fetch it, and understand it. Here are the 10 technical signals I check in CiteRadar and what to do about each. None of them guarantees citations. They're prerequisites.
1. HTTPS reachability
If your site doesn't load cleanly over HTTPS (certificate errors, redirect loops, timeouts), crawlers may give up. Check: curl -I https://yourdomain.com should return 200 (or one redirect that ends in 200).
2. llms.txt
An emerging proposal: a Markdown file at /llms.txt that summarizes who you are and links your key pages. Evidence is thin so far. Ahrefs (137,210 domains, May 2026) found that 97% of published llms.txt files in their sample received zero requests that month. Treat it as optional and cheap, not as proven.
3. AI crawler access in robots.txt
Look for rules that name AI user agents, such as GPTBot, OAI-SearchBot, ChatGPT-User and PerplexityBot. Suff Digital (HTTP Archive, Sept 2026) found 9.9% of 15.5M sites block at least one named AI crawler. Most of those block training bots: only 2.1% block OpenAI's search bots and 1.7% block PerplexityBot. Check whether your host, theme or plugin added rules you didn't intend.
4. Structured data (JSON-LD)
Add schema.org markup (Organization, Article, Product, FAQPage, etc.) in a <script type="application/ld+json"> block so machines get explicit facts about the page.
5. Sitemap
Publish /sitemap.xml and reference it in robots.txt (Sitemap: https://yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml) so crawlers can find your pages.
6. Heading structure
Use one clear <h1> and logical <h2>/<h3> sections. In an AirOps study of ChatGPT answers (reported by Search Engine Land, April 2026), pages whose headings closely matched the query were cited 41.0% of the time, versus about 30% for weaker matches. That's a correlation, not proof of cause, but clear headings help either way.
7. Question-and-answer content
Write sections that directly answer the questions your users ask: a question as a heading, followed by a concise answer.
8. Readable content in raw HTML
Run curl https://yourdomain.com and look at the output. If your main text isn't there because it's rendered client-side, crawlers that don't run JavaScript may see an almost empty page. Server-side rendering or static generation fixes this.
9. Canonical and Open Graph tags
<link rel="canonical"> tells crawlers which URL is the original. Open Graph tags (og:title, og:description, og:image) give a clean title and summary when the page is shared or previewed.
10. Page speed
Slow responses risk timeouts. Keep server response times low and avoid heavy blocking scripts.
Check all 10 at once
I built CiteRadar to run these checks in about 20 seconds: free, no signup. You get a score from 0 to 100, pass/fail for each signal and a prioritized fix list. It launches on Product Hunt on Oct 23, and I'd really like feedback on whether these are the right signals.
👉 Scan your site: https://citeradar.app
Top comments (1)
Useful list of prerequisites. One addition for point 3: a robots.txt that allows a crawler does not show the crawler actually reaches you, because a CDN or WAF rule can block the same bot at the network layer. Logs answer it: filter by the bot's user agent, verify the IP against the vendor's published ranges, and look at status codes. Verified hits returning 200 mean access works. Verified hits returning 403 or 429 point to a block upstream of robots.txt.