How to Get Your Website Cited in AI Search: Google AI Overviews and ChatGPT in 2026

The traffic shift is real. Pew Research Center tracked 68,879 Google searches by 900 U.S. adults and found that users clicked a traditional result in 8% of visits when an AI summary appeared, compared with 15% when none appeared. Only 1% of visits included a click on a link inside the summary. Ahrefs, comparing 300,000 keywords between December 2023 and December 2025, found the presence of an AI Overview correlated with a 58% lower average click-through rate for the top-ranking page.

What has not changed is how sources are chosen. Google describes AI Overviews and AI Mode as features built on its existing ranking and quality systems. That is good news for businesses: the work that earns a citation is the same work that earns a ranking, and nothing about it requires a new vendor or a new file format.

Google's documentation is unusually direct: there are no additional requirements to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode, and no special optimizations are necessary. A page must be indexed and eligible to show a snippet in regular Search. Its newer guide, Optimizing your website for generative AI features on Google Search, repeats that SEO best practices remain foundational.

OpenAI runs separate crawlers with separate jobs. OAI-SearchBot surfaces websites in ChatGPT search. GPTBot collects content that may be used to train foundation models. ChatGPT-User fetches a page when a person asks ChatGPT to open it and is not an automatic crawler. To appear in ChatGPT search answers, your robots.txt must allow OAI-SearchBot.

This separation lets a business make a deliberate choice. You can block GPTBot if you do not want your content used for training and still allow OAI-SearchBot so that ChatGPT can cite and link to you. OpenAI notes that robots.txt changes can take about 24 hours to take effect.

A cottage industry now sells generative engine optimization as a new discipline. Google's own guide addresses several of its favourite tactics. It says Google Search does not use llms.txt files or special AI markup, and that creating them will neither harm nor help visibility in Google Search. It says there is no requirement to break content into tiny pieces for AI, and no ideal page length. It says structured data is not required for generative AI search, although it still makes pages eligible for rich results.

We still publish an llms.txt file on this site because some assistants outside Google read it, and it costs nothing to maintain when it is generated from the same data as the pages. The point is to spend effort in proportion to evidence, not to treat a text file as a ranking strategy.

Google's guide draws a line between commodity content, which is based on common knowledge, and content that adds first-hand or expert perspective. An AI summary can already restate common knowledge, so a page that only does the same has little reason to be cited or clicked.

For a business site, non-commodity material usually already exists inside the company: real project timelines and costs, before-and-after measurements, decisions that were tested and abandoned, local regulations explained with examples, and answers to the questions sales teams hear every week. Publishing that material, with dates and sources, is the most durable AI search strategy available.

These are the checks we run when we build or audit a site. None of them is specific to AI, which is exactly why they work across Google, ChatGPT and other assistants.

Google reports traffic from AI Overviews and AI Mode inside the Search Console performance report under the Web search type, and its newer guide points to a generative AI performance report. Google also says clicks from AI results pages tend to be higher quality. For ChatGPT, look for referral traffic from chatgpt.com in your analytics.

Because fewer searches end in a click, the right scorecard combines visibility with outcomes: impressions for priority queries, citations you can observe in AI answers, and the number and quality of enquiries that reference those topics.