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answer engines queried live per citation test: ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Gemini
When buyers ask ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude or Gemini for a recommendation in your category, are you named, or is a competitor? If you're not in the answer, they never find you, never search your brand, never land. CrawlBit tracks whether AI answers cite you, surfaces who gets cited instead, and shows you how to get in.
You keep the client, the relationship and the invoice. We do the half that does not fit inside a dashboard: the work on pages your client does not own, executed, under your name. White-label reports, one workspace per client, and we are never in front of them.
Even Google reports your AI Overview visibility inside Search Console now. The shift isn't a prediction anymore, the biggest name in search is already measuring it. CrawlBit is the radar across every engine, not just Google's slice.
A polished store now scores 85 to 90 on a technical audit. Modern platforms ship llms.txt and schema by default. Run its category through ChatGPT, though, and it's absent from every answer while competitors get named. Passing the checklist isn't the same as being cited. CrawlBit measures the part that decides who the AI sends buyers to.
Two independent studies published in 2026 measured how much answer engines actually agree with each other. They barely do. Around 70% of cited sources are cited by one engine and no other, so a tool that watches a single engine is not measuring "the AI", it is measuring one of them.
| Answer engine | Sources per answer | What it means for you |
|---|---|---|
| Gemini | 11.0 | Widest net, easiest to enter |
| Perplexity | 8.6 | Citation-first by design |
| Google AI Mode | 7.8 | Closest to classic search |
| Claude | 6.8 | Favours long-form editorial |
| ChatGPT | 3.7 | Three times harder to get into |
Sources: SurfacedBy, 127,198 citations across 5 engines, March to June 2026 (69.6% single-engine); Writesonic, 161,286 queries across 4 engines, May to June 2026 (72–73% single-engine). Two unrelated samples, two methods, three points apart. Limits worth knowing: both studies are English-language and weighted toward buying queries, so treat the ranking as directional, not as your market. Last verified August 2026.
Fair pushback: a citation isn't a sale. It's the AI-era version of ranking on page one or landing in a "best of" list, the first step, not the last. When an assistant hands back a shortlist and your name isn't on it, the buyer never finds you, never searches your brand, never reaches your site. Get named and you're back in the running; what happens next is your site's job, exactly like every other discovery channel. CrawlBit gets you into the answer, and a channel where you're invisible converts no one.
An example of the report an agency hands its client. Figures are illustrative, not a real account. Agencies run one workspace per client and export it under their own header.
Every tool on the market tells you whether you are cited. Here the audit that shows what is holding you back is free. You pay for the live citation test and for the off-page work that changes the answer.
Citation testing queries four answer engines live, ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude and Gemini, through their APIs with web search, which is the closest available proxy to what a user sees in the consumer apps. You count as cited when at least one of them names you. Gemini confirms the citation at domain level only: Google returns the domain it used, never the page, so the quoted passages and the competitor pages come from the other three. No citation is ever guaranteed: you pay for the audit, the plan and the placements, and for an honest measure of what changed. The rate comes from 20 buyer-intent questions asked three times, and it is published with its 95% confidence interval rather than as a bare percentage: with 20 questions, a difference under roughly 20 points cannot be told apart from the normal variation between two runs, and “non-conclusive” is a verdict the re-test is allowed to return. Every purchase carries a 14-day money-back guarantee.
Answer Engine Optimization: making your site readable, quotable and citable by AI assistants like ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Perplexity, so they mention you in their answers.
We run the buyer-intent questions your customers actually type through four answer engines live, ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude and Gemini, each with web search, and parse every answer for mentions, links and references to your domain. You count as cited when at least one of them names you. We query them through their APIs, which is the closest available proxy to the consumer apps your buyers use.
A citation is discovery, not a sale. When a buyer asks an AI for a recommendation and only a few names come back, being absent means they never find you or search your brand. Getting named puts you back in the consideration set; converting that visit is your site's job, like any channel. CrawlBit doesn't promise sales, but a discovery channel where you're invisible can't produce any.
No. Paste your URL and the crawler does the rest. Optional: add the llms.txt we generate to your site root.
A plain-text manifest that lists what your site is about and which pages matter, like robots.txt but addressed to answer engines. The honest caveat: there is still no public evidence that a major answer engine uses it, and the controlled tests published so far have failed to show an effect. CrawlBit generates one because it costs nothing, but we do not sell it as a lever and we do not rank it as a priority fix.