SEO for AI: how to check if ChatGPT and Google already cite you

Ranking #1 on Google no longer guarantees an AI will recommend you. According to an Ahrefs analysis of billions of citations, only 6.82% of the pages ChatGPT cites overlap with Google’s top 10, and 28.3% of ChatGPT’s most-cited pages have zero organic visibility on Google at all. In other words: you can be the market leader on search and still be invisible when a prospect asks an AI assistant. Here’s how to check that for your own business and what to do if the answer is no.

The stat that should worry you if you live off SEO

The same Ahrefs study shows the overlap is shrinking even between Google and its own AI results: pages cited in Google AI Overviews that also ranked in the traditional top 10 fell from 76% in mid-2025 to 38% in early 2026. Google attributes part of that drop to better citation-tracking on Ahrefs’ side rather than a pure behavior change, but the underlying trend is confirmed by Google Search’s own blog: AI Mode and AI Overviews aren’t a summary of the top 10 anymore — they’re a source-selection engine with their own criteria. If your strategy is “rank high on Google” and nothing else, you’re only seeing half the picture.

Why Google and ChatGPT no longer reward the same pages

A classic search engine ranks by relevance and link authority. A generative engine does something different: it browses, cross-checks a handful of sources, and drafts an answer, favoring content it can cite without risk — verifiable claims, backed by concrete data, on pages it can load and parse without ambiguity. That rewards pages that are technically accessible to AI crawlers and self-contained in what they say, even if they don’t have the most backlinks. It’s the same principle we covered in our GEO guide — what’s new is that there’s now data quantifying just how far the two channels have already diverged.

How to check if you’re being cited, with no paid tools

The manual method: just ask

Open ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude and Perplexity and ask what a real customer would ask: “recommend a [your industry] company in [your city]” or “what are my options for [your service]”. Note whether you’re mentioned, in what position, and which source backs it up. Repeat with 5-6 phrasings — a single try isn’t representative, since these models vary their answers between queries.

Check which AI crawlers actually visit your site

Each assistant crawls the web with its own user-agent: GPTBot and OAI-SearchBot (OpenAI), ClaudeBot (Anthropic), PerplexityBot, and Google-Extended (for Gemini and AI Overviews). If you can access your server logs or Cloudflare/Vercel Analytics, filter for these user-agents over the past week. If they never show up, those engines simply aren’t indexing your content — that’s an access problem, not a quality problem.

Check the technical minimum

Three things, two minutes: whether your robots.txt accidentally blocks any of those bots (more common than you’d think, especially in legacy setups), whether an llms.txt file exists at your domain root, and whether the opening paragraph of your key pages answers “what does this company do, and for whom” without relying on the rest of the site. Those three are the most common reasons a legitimate, capable business doesn’t get cited.

What to do if the diagnosis comes back negative

If the manual test doesn’t mention you and the logs confirm AI bots barely visit your site, more generic content won’t fix it — access and structure will. Our GEO guide covers the full checklist (structured data, FAQs written the way people actually ask an AI, llms.txt); the point here is simply to confirm, with your own data instead of a guess, whether the problem exists in the first place.

This is exactly what we audit when a client asks us about SEO- and AI-optimized websites: measurable technical SEO plus the GEO layer most studios in Spain still aren’t applying, starting at €3,500 with delivery in 4-6 weeks. If you want to know how an AI sees your business today before you invest in fixing it, get in touch: the first consultation is free, and you’ll leave with a concrete diagnosis, not a generic checklist.