Is ChatGPT citing your site? A 30 minute way to check (and what makes a page citable)

If you ship a small SaaS, you can treat "does ChatGPT cite us?" like any other measurement problem: fixed inputs, repeated runs, a simple log, and one change at a time. Here is what the October 2026 data says, a method, and the page level changes that make a page easier to cite.

The data, briefly

• CueScout (500 answers, 4,709 cited links, 50 software buying questions, 1 and 2 Oct): ChatGPT averaged 4.7 distinct pages and 3.7 searches per answer; 63% of cited pages were on the site of a brand the answer named; zero Reddit, YouTube or Wikipedia citations in 100 ChatGPT answers. Perplexity kept 73% of cited sites day to day vs 23% for ChatGPT. Vendor sells citation tracking. https://cuescout.com/blog/which-sources-chatgpt-gemini-perplexity-cite
• TheToolsVerse (40 questions, ChatGPT, Gemini, AI Mode, 9 Oct): of 600 distinct cited pages, 556 (92.7%) were cited by one engine only and 2 (0.33%) by all three: a vendor pricing page and a vendor help article answering an "is it free" fact. Semrush affiliate promo content. https://thetoolsverse.com/blog/ai-citation-overlap-chatgpt-gemini-ai-mode
• Kingy AI Citation Index (1,200 questions asked twice via API, 7,200 answers): cross provider cited domain Jaccard about 0.06; same provider two run overlap 0.664 (OpenAI), 0.515 (Claude), 0.319 (Gemini); native citations in 71.6%, 53.7% and 25.2% of answers. Funded by Kingy.ai; API may differ from consumer apps. https://kingy.ai/research/kaci-wave-one-ai-citation-study/
• Lead Rescue (7,409 citations, 606 answers, 39 buyer questions, 8 brands): the brand asked about got 2% to 4% of citations; other companies' blogs and guides took 34% to 55%; ChatGPT pulled 24% from help docs, research, government and Wikipedia. Vendor sells citation tracking. https://leadrescue.app/resources/research/page-types-ai-engines-cite
• Is My Brand in AI (50 price questions, 5 engines): median share of answer figures found on a cited page was 57% for ChatGPT, 82% AI Overviews, 71% Gemini, 92% Perplexity, 91% Claude API. Founder research for a visibility product. https://ismybrandinai.com/do-the-numbers-in-ai-answers-have-sources

Takeaway: engines are independent systems with low overlap and high run to run variance. Measure per engine, repeat, and give them a plain owned page to quote.

The method (30 minutes)

1. Freeze 3 to 5 buyer questions. Store them in a file. Exact strings, never edited.
2. Fresh chat per engine. New session, memory off where possible, one paste per question, no follow ups.
3. Log you / competitor / nobody, one cell per question per engine, plus a boolean for "answer had any citations". A CSV is enough:

date,run,engine,question_id,outcome,had_citations,cited_urls
2026-10-12,1,chatgpt,q1,competitor,true,"https://rival.example/pricing"
2026-10-12,1,perplexity,q1,you,true,"https://yoursite.example/pricing"
2026-10-12,1,gemini,q1,nobody,false,""

1. Rerun twice before calling a move. Given same provider overlap of 0.319 to 0.664 in Kingy's runs, one sample is noise. Require a pattern across at least three runs on different days.
2. Verify one number. For one price answer, open each cited URL and mark each figure found or not found.

What makes a page citable

None of this guarantees a citation. These are the properties shared by the pages the studies above saw cited: vendor pricing pages, help articles, and narrow fact pages.

Plain product, price and buyer statements. Put a literal sentence near the top: "Acme Invoice is an invoicing tool for freelance designers. Plans start at $X per month. The free plan covers up to 3 clients." Render it as HTML text, not inside an image, a canvas, or a client side widget that only appears after JavaScript runs. If a fetcher cannot read the price in the initial HTML, it cannot quote it.

One question per FAQ entry, answered in the first sentence. "Is Acme free for teams under 5? Yes, up to 3 clients." Then the detail. Narrow "is it free" facts were the only pages all three engines cited in the TheToolsVerse sample.

Schema basics. Structured data does not force a citation, but it makes facts unambiguous to parsers. Keep it consistent with the visible text:

<script type="application/ld+json">
{
  "@context": "https://schema.org",
  "@type": "SoftwareApplication",
  "name": "Acme Invoice",
  "applicationCategory": "BusinessApplication",
  "offers": { "@type": "Offer", "price": "12.00", "priceCurrency": "EUR" }
}
</script>
<script type="application/ld+json">
{
  "@context": "https://schema.org",
  "@type": "FAQPage",
  "mainEntity": [{
    "@type": "Question",
    "name": "Is Acme Invoice free for small teams?",
    "acceptedAnswer": { "@type": "Answer", "text": "Yes. The free plan covers up to 3 clients." }
  }]
}
</script>

Crawlable and dated. Server rendered or static HTML, a stable URL, a visible "last updated" date, and nothing blocking the page in robots.txt that you actually want read.

Help docs count. Lead Rescue saw ChatGPT draw 24% of citations from help docs and similar sources. A clear docs page answering a buyer question can do more than another homepage rewrite. Lead Rescue also found other companies' guides took the largest share, so a useful guest guide elsewhere is a reasonable second move.

Ship one page, then rerun your frozen questions over two weeks and compare the log.

Free sheet

I made a free 5-prompt sheet for this: https://normbrytande.gumroad.com/l/quwzbl (and a 30-day version, The Money Prompt Lab, https://normbrytande.gumroad.com/l/wfkslz). Disclosure: I made both.