Whether AI tools like ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, and Google's AI Overviews can extract and recommend your content. The newest and most important category.
AI Citability is a new category we built for SEOGrade because no existing SEO tool measured it. It answers one question: when someone asks ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, or Google AI Overviews a question your business could answer, does the AI know your brand exists — and does it have structured, extractable content to cite?
The underlying mechanics are a mix of classic SEO and new AI-specific signals: robots.txt access for AI crawlers (GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot, Google-Extended), content extractability (can an LLM actually parse your page, or is the answer buried inside a JavaScript app or a PDF?), structured data (FAQ schema, definition blocks, Q&A markup), entity presence (Wikipedia, Crunchbase, industry directories), and answer-ready content formatting.
If your whole business strategy is "show up when people search," AI Citability is what "show up when people ask ChatGPT" looks like. For the full deep dive, see our dedicated page at /ai-seo.
ChatGPT has hundreds of millions of weekly users. Perplexity is growing fast. Google's AI Overviews appear on a growing share of SERPs. Every query that gets answered in-place is a click you don't get.
A decade ago, not ranking on Google meant your business didn't exist. Today, not being cited by ChatGPT means you're invisible to the fastest-growing category of customer discovery.
Ahrefs, Semrush, and Moz were built for link graphs and keyword rankings. None of them check whether GPTBot can access your robots.txt or whether Perplexity quotes your pages.
The biggest AI Citability wins are robots.txt edits and schema markup — high-impact changes you can ship in an afternoon once you know what to do.
Our free audit runs these checks on your AI Citability signals in about 60 seconds.
Start with robots.txt — unblock GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot, and Google-Extended if you haven't. Add FAQ and HowTo schema to your top pages. Rewrite headings into question format where natural. Claim your entity on Wikidata and Crunchbase. The Full Blueprint includes a full AI Citability audit with exact code snippets.
Explore all 9 categories: Crawlability · Technical SEO · On-Page SEO · Content & E-E-A-T · Authority · GEO · pSEO · Local SEO. Ready to grade yours? Run the free SEOGrade audit.
AI Citability is whether AI engines like ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews can actually extract, understand, and recommend your content in their answers. It's a composite of AI crawler access, structured data, entity presence, and content parseability.
Allow AI crawlers in robots.txt, add FAQ and HowTo schema, format content in question-and-answer structures, make sure your main content is in HTML (not locked inside React apps or PDFs), and claim your entity on Wikidata and Crunchbase.
No. GPTBot is OpenAI's crawler — blocking it only removes you from ChatGPT's search and citations. Google uses its own crawlers (Googlebot and Google-Extended). But blocking GPTBot does remove you from the fastest-growing search channel on the internet.
Regular SEO optimizes for Google's blue links. AI Citability optimizes for being quoted inside an AI-generated answer. Many signals overlap (schema, content quality, authority), but some are AI-specific — like allowing AI crawlers and claiming entities on Wikidata.
Want the deep dive? The full AI Citability deep dive →