I Asked ChatGPT 20 Questions My Blog Answers: Cited Once

To get cited by ChatGPT, your pages first have to be findable by ChatGPT’s search, and OpenAI says the only requirements are letting its OAI-SearchBot crawl your site and not blocking its servers. I tested my own blog with 20 questions my posts answer. ChatGPT cited me once. My posts were built better than most pages it did cite, so writing wasn’t the problem. Being found was.

The test: 20 questions my posts already answer

I wanted to know exactly how to position my posts for ChatGPT, and I didn’t want to guess. So I picked 20 questions real readers type, each one answered by a post on this blog. How do I set up Claude Code in VS Code. Why is my n8n schedule trigger not running. Do I need Rank Math Pro. That kind of thing.

Then I asked ChatGPT’s search model every one of them through OpenAI’s API and wrote down every site it cited. Each question cost about a cent in search fees plus a little for the words it read, and it’s the model OpenAI says is “used by Search in ChatGPT.”

The result: 1 answer out of 20 cited my blog. It was the question about syncing Apple Health data to Airtable, and it cited my Apple Watch to Airtable post five times, introducing it with “A recent example walks through exactly this.”

The other 19 cited Reddit, GitHub, the official docs, and a long list of small sites I’d never heard of. 124 different pages in total. So this isn’t a big-sites-only club. Small sites get cited all the time. Just not mine.

How does ChatGPT decide which sites to cite?

OpenAI doesn’t publish a ranking formula. Its help page on ChatGPT search says ChatGPT ranks search results “using multiple factors intended to help users find relevant, reliable information,” and then, plainly: “Placement is not guaranteed.”

What OpenAI does spell out is how to be eligible at all:

• Let OAI-SearchBot crawl your site. Its bot documentation says sites that block it “will not be shown in ChatGPT search answers.”
• Don’t block OpenAI’s servers. The same help page says to “confirm that the website host or content delivery network allows traffic from OpenAI’s published searchbot IP addresses.”
• GPTBot is a different bot. It’s for training AI models, and OpenAI says you can block it and still appear in search.

One more piece that matters: OpenAI says ChatGPT search “sometimes partners with other search providers” and sends them rewritten versions of your question. It doesn’t name which ones on that page, but the privacy links it lists there are Microsoft’s and Shopify’s.

My four blogs let every one of those bots in. I’d checked that a few days earlier. So I was eligible, and still mostly invisible.

Why wasn’t my blog cited?

My first guess was the writing. Maybe my posts weren’t structured the way AI answers like. So I pulled the 107 cited pages I could open and compared them against my 19 matching posts.

	Pages ChatGPT cited	My matching posts
Has a comparison table	46 of 107 (43%)	19 of 19
Has an FAQ section	39 of 107 (36%)	19 of 19
Updated since June 2026	49 of the 72 with dates	19 of 19
Typical length	about 1,700 words	about 2,200 words

My posts beat the cited pages on every row. Whatever ChatGPT’s search is picking on, it isn’t tables and FAQs, or I’d have been everywhere.

So I tested something simpler: could it find my posts when I asked for them by name? For three of them, yes. It summarized my n8n error workflow post, my Hostinger post, and my Rank Math Pro post without trouble. For two others, my Claude Code setup and memory posts, it came back empty. And when I asked “What’s on jen8n.com?”, it told me it “couldn’t find any confirmation of an active site at the URL jen8n.com.”

That one stung a little. I have over 50 posts.

I can’t prove why it missed those two, and I’m not going to pretend I can. It wasn’t age, since one it found is newer than one it missed. What the test does show is where the problem sits: before the writing, at the step where ChatGPT’s search looks for pages to read.

How to position your blog posts for ChatGPT

Here’s the order I’d do it in, based on what OpenAI and the search engines actually say, plus what my one citation showed me.

1. Check your robots.txt. Open yoursite.com/robots.txt. If you see OAI-SearchBot with “Disallow: /” under it, you’re blocked from ChatGPT search. Mine had nothing blocking it.
2. Get into the search indexes ChatGPT leans on. Set up Bing Webmaster Tools and turn on IndexNow. Bing’s own announcement says IndexNow “helps ensure that AI systems reference the most current version of a page.” OpenAI never says ChatGPT uses Bing by name, so treat this as the likeliest door, not a guarantee.
3. Stay in Google too. Google’s page on AI features says there are “no additional requirements to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode” beyond normal indexing, and “You don’t need to create new machine readable files, AI text files, or markup.” That covers llms.txt, which I already get for free from Rank Math anyway.
4. Write the worked example. My one citation wasn’t picked as a list of tips. ChatGPT pointed readers to it as the real walkthrough of a specific setup. I read that as the part it couldn’t write on its own.

What I’d skip: rewriting posts to add more tables and FAQs just for ChatGPT. My test says that’s not the bottleneck, at least not for me.

What makes someone click through from ChatGPT to your blog?

ChatGPT answers the question right there in the chat, so a citation alone doesn’t guarantee a visit. My bet is people click when your page has something the answer can’t hold. Your real result, a tool they can use, or the worked example they want to see in full.

That’s the same pattern as my Apple Health citation. ChatGPT summarized the options, then sent people to my post for the version someone actually built.

If you want to see whether those clicks happen, OpenAI says ChatGPT adds “utm_source=chatgpt.com” to the links it sends people through. I set up tracking for AI traffic in GA4 a while back, and it counted 12 visits over six weeks. That post counts people who clicked. This one is about the step before, getting mentioned at all.

Build your own ChatGPT citation test

Your test should use your questions, since mine only fit my blog. The generator below asks for your blog’s address and up to five questions your readers type, then gives you three quick checks, a version to run in the ChatGPT app for free, and a Claude Code skill that runs the same test I ran and saves the results so you can compare next time.

The skill uses the same request I used for my test. The app version is slower, since you paste each question into a new chat yourself, and it costs nothing.

What this test can’t tell you

It’s one run of 20 questions on one day. ChatGPT’s answers change, so a second run could cite me twice, or not at all.

It used the API, not the ChatGPT app. OpenAI says the API gives you “the fine-tuned models and tool used by Search in ChatGPT,” which is as close as I can get, but it never says the two will always match.

It shows where my blog went missing, not the exact reason. I’ve named what OpenAI says matters and what my numbers rule out. The rest I’d be guessing at.

What I’m doing next

I’m setting up Bing Webmaster Tools with IndexNow for all four of my blogs, then running the same 20 questions again in a few weeks. If the number moves off 1, I’ll write it up with the before and after. If it doesn’t, I’ll write that up too.

Frequently asked questions

Try it yourself

Getting cited by ChatGPT starts with being findable: allow OAI-SearchBot, don’t block OpenAI’s servers, get your site into the search indexes it leans on, and publish the worked example it can’t write itself. Then test it with your own readers’ questions, because my 1 in 20 only tells you about my blog.

Related reading

• How to track AI traffic in GA4
• Do you need Rank Math Pro?
• How I add internal links to every blog post with Claude Code

Subscribe if you want the re-test when it lands, and go ask ChatGPT what’s on your site. Brace yourself a little.