Confirm the page is indexed before anything else
Google's AI surfaces run on ordinary Google Search eligibility and nothing else. The requirement is that your page is indexed and eligible to be shown in Google Search with a snippet. Open Search Console, run URL Inspection on the exact address you want cited, and read what comes back. If it isn't indexed, stop here. Nothing further down this page matters until that's fixed, and it's an indexing problem rather than an AI problem.
The technical requirements are three and they're short. Googlebot isn't blocked. The page works, which means Google only indexes pages served with an HTTP 200 success status code. The page has indexable content, in a file type Google Search supports, not violating the spam policies. Meet those three and you're eligible, though Google's AI features page is clear that indexing and serving still aren't guaranteed.
Copilot answers off the Bing index, so ask the same first question there with a different tool: sign in to Bing Webmaster Tools and confirm the URL is indexed. ChatGPT, Perplexity and Claude publish no index checker at all, which is why the crawler checks below are the only diagnostic you get on those three.
Check that nothing is suppressing your snippet
A snippet directive can remove you from AI Overviews and AI Mode while your rankings sit untouched, and it's the easiest thing on this list to inherit from somebody else's template. Google's robots meta tag documentation says nosnippet will also prevent the content from being used as a direct input for AI Overviews and AI Mode. A max-snippet value of 0 is equivalent to nosnippet. Set it to -1 and Google picks the length itself.
View the page source and search it for nosnippet, max-snippet and noindex. Then check the response headers too, because the same rules can arrive as an X-Robots-Tag header, where nobody thinks to look. A page can read perfectly clean in the source and still be carrying the directive from the server.
data-nosnippet is the one that hides in a template. It marks a passage rather than a whole page, it works on span, div and section elements only, and it does nothing at all on any other tag. Somebody wraps a boilerplate block in it, the template moves, and now it's sitting around the exact paragraph you want quoted. Search your source for data-nosnippet and read what's inside each one.
There is no AI-only opt-out at Google. The directive that pulls you out of AI Overviews and AI Mode is the same directive that kills your regular search snippet, so this is one decision and not two. If you're here to be cited, you want none of these on the page.
Get the bot names right, because the wrong one does nothing
Three of these engines decide search visibility with a crawler whose name is not the one people block. The ones that govern citation are OAI-SearchBot for ChatGPT, PerplexityBot for Perplexity and Claude-SearchBot for Claude, alongside Googlebot and Bingbot for everything else. Open your own robots.txt in a browser right now and read every Disallow line against that list.
OpenAI's documentation is direct about the consequence: sites that are opted out of OAI-SearchBot will not be shown in ChatGPT search answers, though they can still appear as navigational links. GPTBot is the training crawler, described as making the foundation models more useful and safe, and blocking it changes nothing about ChatGPT search. OAI-SearchBot didn't exist until late 2024, so a rule written in 2023 can only have named GPTBot: a site that blocked by name is still open to ChatGPT search and thinks it isn't, while a site that disallowed every user agent has been shut out of it since the day the bot launched.
Perplexity says PerplexityBot is designed to surface and link websites in search results on Perplexity and isn't used to crawl for foundation models. Anthropic splits the same way, with Claude-SearchBot navigating the web to improve search result quality and ClaudeBot doing the training crawl. Blocking one leaves the other running, so a single blanket rule is almost never what the person writing it meant.
Google-Extended controls nothing about AI Overviews or AI Mode, and most published advice has this backwards in both directions. Google's crawler documentation says it manages whether your content may be used for training future generations of Gemini models, and that Google-Extended does not impact a site's inclusion in Google Search nor is it used as a ranking signal in Google Search. Blocking it won't remove you from AI Overviews. Allowing it won't get you in.
The user-triggered fetchers ignore all of this. ChatGPT-User, Perplexity-User and Claude-User run when a person asks for a specific page. OpenAI's wording is that because these actions are initiated by a user, robots.txt rules may not apply, and Perplexity says its fetcher generally ignores robots.txt rules. An opt-out stops the index. It doesn't stop somebody who pastes your URL into a chat.
Check the edge, more than the robots file
robots.txt is not where blocks actually happen. Your file can say allow while Cloudflare, Akamai or your host's bot management hands the crawler a 403 or a challenge page, and none of that is visible from outside. Google puts it in its own best-practice list for AI features: make sure crawling is allowed in robots.txt, and by any CDN or hosting infrastructure.
Pull your server and CDN logs and search the user agent field for the bot names. Read what you find in two ways. A bot that shows up and gets a 403 or a challenge page is being turned away at the edge, and that's a firewall rule rather than anything to do with your content. A bot that never appears at all hasn't reached you yet, which is more often a discovery or indexation problem than a block, though a WAF that drops requests before logging can look the same. Either way the next stop is your CDN's bot-management rules. Each vendor publishes its source addresses so you can confirm a hit was genuine: openai.com/searchbot.json, perplexity.ai/perplexitybot.json and claude.com/crawling/bots.json.
Perplexity asks for both things, in its own instruction: allow PerplexityBot in robots.txt and permit requests from its published IP ranges. An allow line on its own doesn't finish the job when your firewall filters by address. Then test it yourself. Request your own page with curl, setting the user agent to each bot name in turn. A 403 back is a real finding: a user-agent rule is turning the bot away. A 200 back proves less than it looks, because the request came from your address and not the crawler's, so a firewall that filters by IP will wave you through and still block the bot. Only the logs settle that one.
Copilot: pull NOARCHIVE, then ping IndexNow if you want
Two directives govern whether Copilot can cite you, and one of them removes the link itself. Microsoft's September 2023 announcement is the published statement on it, written back when Copilot was called Bing Chat. NOCACHE means the content may be included in answers, with only the URL, snippet and title displayed. NOARCHIVE means the content will not be included in answers and will not be linked to in them. Carry both and Microsoft treats it as NOCACHE.
NOARCHIVE is not a cache setting, whatever the name suggests, and plenty of sites carry one that somebody added years ago for a reason that had nothing to do with this. Search your source and your headers for it the same way you searched for nosnippet. No tag at all is full eligibility, so on this one, doing nothing is the correct configuration.
Freshness is the only thing you can actively push here, and it isn't a request to be cited. IndexNow takes a GET to the endpoint carrying a url parameter and a key parameter, the key running between 8 and 128 characters, with an optional keyLocation when your key file doesn't sit at the site root. A 200 back means the URL was submitted. It promises nothing about whether or when anything gets indexed.
What you can measure, and what nobody reports
Google folds the AI surfaces into normal reporting with no breakout. Its documentation says sites appearing in AI features are included in the overall search traffic in Search Console, reported on in the Performance report within the Web search type. That's the whole of it. There's no AI Overviews row and no AI Mode filter, so anyone quoting you an AI Overviews click-through rate out of Search Console is reading a number that doesn't exist there.
The other four report no AI citations to you at all. Bing Webmaster Tools gives you Bing search impressions and clicks, but Microsoft publishes no Copilot citation breakout, and OpenAI, Perplexity and Anthropic publish no publisher analytics of any kind. If you weren't cited, nobody tells you, and if you were, nobody tells you that either.
So you check it by hand, on a schedule. Write down the questions a customer would actually type, run every one of them in each engine on the same day each month, and record whether you were named and which page got cited instead of yours. Never change the question list. A list that moves gives you a story instead of a measurement.
If you're still not being cited
There's no appeal, and it's worth knowing that before you go hunting for one. None of the five has a form, a support queue or an escalation path for inclusion in an AI answer, and nobody accepts the request. All of this also assumes pages you control: if the answers you want changed are about you personally and they're citing sites you don't own, none of these checks touch that, and it's separate work.
Run the four checks in order and stop at the first failure. Is the URL indexed in that engine's underlying index. Is a snippet directive suppressing it. Is the named search bot reaching you at all, confirmed in your logs rather than assumed from your robots file. Does that bot specifically get a 200. The third one is where most of these end, and it's the only one you can't see from outside your own server.
If all four pass and you're still not cited, there's nothing left to file. Not one of the five documents how it picks among the pages that are already eligible, so every published method for ranking in Perplexity or getting picked up by ChatGPT is inference rather than documentation. Price anybody selling you a guaranteed AI citation accordingly.
What's left is ordinary work, and Google lists it as ordinary work rather than as an AI requirement: internal links so your content is easily findable, a great page experience, and important content available in textual form, supported by images and video where they apply, with structured data that matches the visible text on the page and current Business Profile and Merchant Center information. None of that is AI-specific and none of it is new.