# How do I check whether ChatGPT cites my website? Ask ChatGPT the questions your buyers ask, with search turned on, and read the sources listed under each answer for your domain. Repeat every question on several days, because answers change between runs. To do it at scale, an AI citation check sends up to 10 prompts to a search-enabled model and records which domains it cites. By SEOBolt. Published 13 November 2026, updated 13 November 2026. ## Why this happens ChatGPT does not keep a ranking of websites that you can look up. Each answer is generated for one request: the model searches, picks pages, writes a reply and lists the pages it used. Ask the same question tomorrow, or with slightly different wording, and the pages can change. That is why one lucky screenshot proves little and why a single miss proves little too. Two more things make checking harder than it looks. The ChatGPT app and the API do not always behave the same way, so a check run through the API can differ from what a logged-out visitor sees. And being named in an answer is not the same as being cited: a model can mention your brand from memory without linking to you, and it can link to you without naming you. So treat citation checking as sampling. You are estimating how often a set of real questions ends with your domain among the sources, not reading a rank. ## How to check it yourself, step by step This works with any ChatGPT account and no extra tool. 1. **Write 5 to 10 prompts in your buyers' words.** Use the questions a customer types before they know your name: "best invoicing software for freelancers", "alternative to ", "how do I fix ". Avoid putting your brand in the prompt, because that tests recall, not discovery. Keep the exact wording in a spreadsheet. 2. **Run each prompt with search on.** Open a new chat for every prompt so earlier messages do not steer the answer, turn on web search, and ask the question. Open the list of sources under the answer. Record whether your domain appears, whether your brand is named in the text, and which other domains are listed. 3. **Repeat on different days.** Run each prompt at least three times over a week. Note the share of runs where you appear. One appearance in three runs is a different situation from three in three, and from zero. 4. **Look at the pages that were cited instead of you.** The cited pages are usually comparison articles, review sites, community threads and documentation. They tell you which pages shape the answer for that question. Getting accurately listed on a relevant third-party page is a legitimate editorial task; do not try to trick the model. 5. **Check your analytics for ChatGPT visits.** OpenAI says ChatGPT adds the parameter utm_source=chatgpt.com to links in search results, so visits show up in Google Analytics and similar tools under that source. Filter your landing pages by it. Visits mean at least some answers do link to you. 6. **Confirm ChatGPT's crawler can reach you.** ChatGPT search shows sites that allow OAI-SearchBot. If your robots.txt or firewall blocks it, no amount of content work will help. The robots.txt and crawler pages linked below walk through the test. ## What each way of checking tells you Ways to check ChatGPT citations and what each one can and cannot show (OpenAI documentation read 13 November 2026) | Method | What it shows | What it does not show | | --- | --- | --- | | Ask ChatGPT by hand with search on | What a real person sees for one prompt, including the exact sources shown | How often it happens; it does not scale past a few prompts | | Referral traffic with utm_source=chatgpt.com | Visits that actually came from a link in ChatGPT | Answers that named you without a link, or answers nobody clicked | | An API-based citation check | Many prompts at once, repeatable, with a history | The exact answer a logged-out ChatGPT app visitor sees; the API can differ | | Server logs for OAI-SearchBot and ChatGPT-User | That OpenAI's crawlers fetch your pages | Whether any answer used the page | ## When to use SEOBolt for this SEOBolt's seo_ai_citations tool does the API-based check. You give it up to 10 buyer prompts; it asks an AI engine with live web search (the OpenAI Responses API with web search) and reports, per prompt, whether your domain is cited, whether your brand is mentioned, which other domains are cited, and an excerpt of the answer. It also returns citation share of voice by domain and the third-party pages cited most, and stores each run as history on the project so you can see change over time. If you give it no prompts, it builds them from your project's top non-brand Search Console queries (best and alternative). The tool needs a plan that includes AI citation checks; /pricing shows which one. Because it uses the API, its answers can differ from the logged-out ChatGPT app, so use it to spot patterns and confirm important prompts by hand. MCP tools involved: `seo_ai_citations`. **When SEOBolt is not the right tool:** It checks one AI engine with web search, not Perplexity, Gemini or Claude, and it samples at most 10 prompts per run. If you need hundreds of prompts or several engines tracked daily, use a dedicated monitoring product built for that. ## Prompt to give your AI assistant With the SEOBolt MCP server connected (https://seobolt.app/mcp-seo): ```text Assign to SEOBolt: run seo_ai_citations for my project with these prompts: "best for ", "
alternative", "how do I ". Then list which domains are cited instead of mine and which third-party pages are cited most. Show me what you did so I can approve any follow-up work. ``` ## FAQ ### Why does ChatGPT give different sources each time I ask? Each answer is generated per request from a fresh web search, so the pages it picks can change between runs. That is why checks should be repeated on several days and reported as a share of runs, not a single result. ### Can I make ChatGPT cite my site? Not on demand and not with a guarantee. You can make sure OAI-SearchBot can crawl the page, publish a clear answer to the question, and be accurately listed on the third-party pages that answers already cite. Anyone promising guaranteed citations is promising something nobody controls. ### Does blocking GPTBot stop ChatGPT from citing me? No. OpenAI documents GPTBot (model training) and OAI-SearchBot (search results) as independent settings. Sites opted out of OAI-SearchBot are not shown in ChatGPT search answers. ### How do I see ChatGPT visits in analytics? OpenAI states that ChatGPT adds utm_source=chatgpt.com to referral URLs in search results. Filter your analytics by that source and look at the landing pages. ## Sources - [OpenAI: Overview of OpenAI crawlers](https://platform.openai.com/docs/bots), read 13 November 2026 - [OpenAI Help Center: Publishers and Developers FAQ](https://help.openai.com/en/articles/12627856-publishers-and-developers-faq), read 13 November 2026 ## Related - [Will blocking GPTBot remove my site from ChatGPT search?](https://seobolt.app/solutions/blocking-gptbot-chatgpt-search) - [How do I check whether my site is visible in AI search?](https://seobolt.app/solutions/check-ai-search-visibility-geo) - [ChatGPT search SEO audit](https://seobolt.app/chatgpt-search-seo) - [ChatGPT visibility checker (free tool)](https://seobolt.app/tools/chatgpt-visibility-checker) - [All problems and solutions](https://seobolt.app/solutions) HTML version: https://seobolt.app/solutions/check-if-chatgpt-cites-my-website