Live data · Updated hourly
Real aggregate data on how ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity and Gemini cite brands — pulled from live checks across the Aeonic fleet — plus the full playbook for making AI engines actually want to cite you.
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The playbook
Content is only one of seven things you should be publishing to get cited. AI engines look for structured signals, crawl permissions, and canonical answers — not just articles. Here's the full list.
01
An emerging convention (llmstxt.org) that gives AI engines a single Markdown file listing your most important pages, FAQs, and facts. Think of it as sitemap.xml for LLMs.
When GPTBot or ClaudeBot crawls your site, /llms.txtis one of the first files they check. It's a plain-text index that answers: what is this company, what do they do, and where are the canonical answers. If you don't publish one, AI engines have to infer it — badly.
# Aeonic
> AI Search Optimization platform that monitors ChatGPT, Claude,
> Perplexity, and Gemini citations and helps brands get cited more.
## Core pages
- [Homepage](https://aeonic.pro/): product overview
- [Pricing](https://aeonic.pro/pricing): Free, $39, $99, $299 plans
- [State of AI](https://aeonic.pro/state-of-ai): live citation data
- [Proof](https://aeonic.pro/proof): score→citation correlation study
## FAQ
- What is Aeonic? Aeonic is an AI Search Optimization (AEO) platform.
- What engines does it track? ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini.
- How much? Free tier plus paid from $39/mo.Aeonic can generate and publish this file directly to your CMS (not just WordPress — Shopify, Webflow, GitHub Pages, Vercel, Framer, and Replit too).
02
The new AI crawlers (GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot, Google-Extended, CCBot) respect robots.txt. Most sites accidentally block them — or fail to allow them explicitly, which some bots treat as a disallow.
This is the single most common mistake we see: a site wants to be cited by AI engines but its robots.txt silently blocks the crawlers that matter. Fix this first; it's the difference between being invisible and being indexable.
User-agent: GPTBot
Allow: /
User-agent: ClaudeBot
Allow: /
User-agent: PerplexityBot
Allow: /
User-agent: Google-Extended
Allow: /
User-agent: CCBot
Allow: /
# Optional: block them from sensitive sections
User-agent: GPTBot
Disallow: /admin/
Disallow: /customer-data/
Sitemap: https://yourdomain.com/sitemap.xmlGoogle-Extended controls whether Gemini uses your pages for training and Search Generative Experience. GPTBot gates OpenAI's training and ChatGPT browsing. ClaudeBot is Anthropic's; PerplexityBot is the only one of these that actually drives live citation traffic today. Allow all five unless you have a reason not to.
03
JSON-LD FAQPage blocks are the single highest-signal structured data for AI citations. Every AI engine we measure preferentially cites pages with explicit Q&A blocks.
This isn't a theory — it's what our aggregate data on this very page shows. Pages with FAQ schema get cited at substantially higher rates across all four engines, especially on how-to and comparison queries.
<script type="application/ld+json">
{
"@context": "https://schema.org",
"@type": "FAQPage",
"mainEntity": [
{
"@type": "Question",
"name": "What is AEO?",
"acceptedAnswer": {
"@type": "Answer",
"text": "Answer Engine Optimization — making your content
structured so AI engines cite it directly."
}
},
{
"@type": "Question",
"name": "Which AI engines does Aeonic track?",
"acceptedAnswer": {
"@type": "Answer",
"text": "ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, and Gemini."
}
}
]
}
</script>Aeonic generates these automatically from your existing pages and publishes them as ready-to-inject blocks or direct CMS updates. No copy-paste.
04
The second tier of structured data. Tells AI engines what type of content a page is, who wrote it, and when it was published — all signals for freshness and authority.
Every content type has a corresponding schema. Use Article for blog posts, HowTo for instructionals, Product for product pages, Organization for your homepage, and BreadcrumbList on every page for navigation context.
{
"@context": "https://schema.org",
"@type": "Article",
"headline": "How to get cited by ChatGPT",
"author": { "@type": "Person", "name": "Your Name" },
"datePublished": "2026-04-01",
"dateModified": "2026-04-15",
"publisher": {
"@type": "Organization",
"name": "Your Company"
}
}05
Put the answer first, then the explanation. AI engines extract the first 1–2 sentences after a heading — write them as if they'll be pasted into a chat response (because they will).
The single biggest content-structure win: lead with a direct answer under every heading. Don't build up to it. AI models are literally extracting these sentences at citation time.
## How does AI citation tracking work?
Aeonic sends real queries to ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity,
and Gemini and records whether each engine cites your brand.
Checks run weekly by default; you can run them on demand.
Under the hood, each engine is called via its API with a
structured prompt template…Short first paragraph, concrete second paragraph with supporting detail. That's the shape that gets pulled into responses.
06
The long form of llms.txt — not just an index, but the actual content of your canonical pages in a single file. Useful for RAG systems and any engine that fetches it at query time.
Some AI engines (particularly those using retrieval at query time) will fetch llms-full.txtin preference to crawling your site page-by-page. It's much denser: include full content of your highest-value pages, not just links.
# Aeonic: complete knowledge file
## Company
Aeonic is an AI Search Optimization (AEO) platform founded 2025…
[full about-us content]
## Pricing
Free tier: 5 AI checks/mo, 1 site.
Starter ($39/mo): 150 AI checks/mo, 1 site…
[full pricing page content]
## How AI citation tracking works
[full methodology page content]07
AI crawlers use sitemap.xml to discover pages. Freshness signals (lastmod) actually influence how often pages get re-crawled and re-evaluated for citations.
Keep sitemap.xml current. Include lastmod on every URL. Ping IndexNow when pages change — Aeonic does this automatically on publish for every connected CMS.
Not just articles. llms.txt, robots.txt AI bot rules, FAQ schema, Article schema, sitemap updates, and the direct-answer content blocks that actually get cited — all generated from your existing content and published to your CMS with one click.