Ask ChatGPT or Perplexity for a shortlist of freight forwarders that handle dangerous goods out of Rotterdam, and the answer names a few companies and links a few pages. Those links are AI citations. They’re the first thing your buyer reads about you, if you’re in them, and the whole of what the buyer reads about the market if you’re not.
This post covers the marketing meaning of the term. How a student cites ChatGPT in a paper is a library question, and we leave it to the libraries.
Two things happen in an answer, and only one of them carries a link
A vendor gets named when its name appears in the text of the answer. A page gets cited when the assistant attaches a link to it as a source. Both can happen in one answer, and either can happen alone.
A vendor can be named from what the model learned in training, with no page fetched at all. A page can be cited because it explained the category well, without the vendor being recommended. We record the 2 in separate columns for that reason.
The 2 assistants handle this differently, and their own documentation says so. OpenAI’s help page on web search, updated in August 2026, says ChatGPT searches on its own when a question would benefit from current information. It adds that “Responses that use web search may include citations”. So a ChatGPT citation exists only when a search happened.
Perplexity’s help centre, last modified 3 September 2026, says “Each answer includes numbered citations linking to the original sources”. There, a citation is on every answer.
For a B2B marketer, that split matters. A name without a citation came from memory. A citation came from a page, and a page is something you can edit.
The buyer’s question is rewritten before it reaches any page
You never see the query that finds you. OpenAI’s page describes the step: before the question reaches a search provider, ChatGPT rewrites it into one or more targeted queries of its own. The buyer types a sentence in their own words. The assistant turns it into shorter searches that you never see.
That’s why keyword lists built for Google are the wrong starting point. The buyer’s sentence is what gets rewritten, so the buyer’s sentence is what to write for. A page that gets cited is one that answered a rewritten version of the question in plain text.
We put that rule on the free check page as the definition of a good question: “Not your brand name”. If the buyer typed your name, you’d win anyway. The test is what happens when they don’t.
Why the answer is read before your site
Your buyer’s cycle starts with a shortlist. Somebody has to produce the first 3 names, and it used to be a search results page, a colleague, or a trade directory. Now it’s often an assistant’s answer, and the assistant’s answer has a shape: a paragraph, a few names, a few links.
A vendor in the answer gets opened by a buyer who already knows what the assistant said. A vendor outside it may never be found. There’s no position 8 to be found on. The answer has room for a handful of vendors, and that’s the whole page.
None of this means the assistant is right. OpenAI’s own page warns users that citations can be wrong, and tells them to open the cited source and check that it supports the answer. The buyer who does that lands on the cited page, which is a second reason the page matters more than the name.
What to do in the first week
Write 3 questions in a buyer’s words, at the moment of choosing: category, size, sector, constraint. Not your name, and not the feature your sales deck leads with.
Ask them, on ChatGPT with Search switched on and on Perplexity, in the same wording on the same day. Save each answer as text rather than a screenshot, so you can search it later.
Record 5 things per answer: the date, the question as typed, the vendors named in order, the pages cited, and whether any of those pages is yours. That’s 6 answers and a 6-row spreadsheet after week one.
Check that the assistants can reach you. Both vendors name the agent that fetches pages for search, OAI-SearchBot for ChatGPT and PerplexityBot for Perplexity. Robots.txt is the text file at yoursite.com/robots.txt that tells crawlers what they may read. If either agent is blocked there, or by your firewall, nothing else on this list will move. Our own robots.txt allows both by name, and we check a client’s file before we write a word.
Then pick the page you’d most want cited for question one and read its opening paragraph as if it were the only thing the assistant lifted. If that paragraph doesn’t answer the question with a number in it, that’s the first edit.
What a citation is not
A citation isn’t traffic, and we don’t sell it as traffic, because the buyer may read the answer and never click. Which page an assistant quotes is its decision, and our terms say so in plain words: “We do not guarantee rankings, traffic, replies, leads or revenue”.
What can be done is narrower and checkable. Your page can be written so that its first paragraph survives being quoted alone. The 3 questions can be asked before the work and 30 days after it, and both answers kept. That, and the 30-day re-run, is what the AI citations article is.
Start with the check, not the article
If the 3 questions have never been run, run them first. It takes 20 minutes, and the answer decides whether there is anything to write. We run them free for the first 15 sites. Send the site and 3 questions to the free check. Within 3 working days we send back what ChatGPT, Perplexity and Gemini answered, who they named, who they cited, and what we would change on the pages.