Being cited in ChatGPT requires three things in order: the assistant must be able to reach your page, it must find a passage that directly answers the question being asked, and it must have reason to treat your site as a credible source on that topic. Most sites that are never cited fail at the first step, usually without knowing it. There is no way to guarantee a citation, because no engine publishes its rules.
ChatGPT reaches the web through named crawlers. If your site blocks them, nothing else you do matters. This is the most common cause of never being cited and the easiest to fix, because it is usually a line in a file somebody added years ago.
The ones that matter, and what each does:
Check your robots.txt for any of those names under a Disallow. Also confirm your pages return real content to a plain request. A page that only assembles itself in the browser can look empty to a crawler that does not run scripts.
An answer engine is looking for a passage it can lift and attribute. That has a practical consequence for how you write: the answer goes first, and the context comes after.
Most business writing does the opposite. It sets the scene, explains why the topic matters, and reaches the answer three paragraphs down. A human skims past the preamble. A model extracting a quotable passage often does not get that far.
Be specific as well. Prices, numbers, names and dates make a passage more quotable, because a vague sentence is not worth citing over a precise one. If you cannot say what something costs, at least say what it does and who it is for.
This is the part no page edit fixes. Engines lean on sources that other sources reference, which means being mentioned in places you do not control matters more than anything on your own site.
Reviews, directories, comparison articles, forum answers and press all feed this. So does having a consistent identity across the web: an entity an engine can resolve rather than a name it cannot connect to anything.
The step most people skip. Publish, wait, and ask the same questions again. Note whether you appear, in what position, and which of your pages was cited.
Doing this by hand across a few prompts is free and worth doing. It stops being practical at the point where you care about several engines, several markets, and whether last month's change is the reason for this month's result. That gap is what Citeon automates: the same prompts, run repeatedly across six engines, with the citing source recorded each time so a change is attributable rather than assumed.
It depends on whether the engine can already reach your pages. ChatGPT's browsing mode reads live search results, so a new page can be cited within days of being indexed. The model's own training data is a different matter and updates on its own schedule, which nobody outside OpenAI controls. Aim at the browsing path, because it is the one you can influence.
It can, and the distinction matters. GPTBot collects data for training. OAI-SearchBot and ChatGPT-User fetch pages for live search and browsing. Blocking GPTBot while allowing the other two is a reasonable position: you opt out of training but stay eligible for citation. Blocking all of them removes you from the answers entirely.
No, and pages written to game a model usually read badly to people, which eventually costs you more than it gains. What helps is ordinary good writing with one habit added: answer the question in the first paragraph rather than the fifth.
No. Anyone selling a guarantee is selling something they cannot deliver. Answer engines change their retrieval and ranking constantly, and none of them publish the rules. What you can do is remove the reasons you are not being cited, then measure whether it changed.
Citeon is in private beta. Tell us your domain and we'll be in touch when there's a place for you.