Is your prospect cited by ChatGPT or Perplexity?

Ask an AI assistant "which plumber should I call in Grenoble for a leak?" with web search on: the answer cites websites and names businesses. Your prospect is there, or it is not. For an SEO or GEO agency, that is as concrete as a Google ranking, provided you measure it properly.

This article is part of our series on the buying signals of a local B2B prospect.

How do ChatGPT and Perplexity find the sites they cite?

Both companies document it:

• ChatGPT: OpenAI says its OAI-SearchBot crawler is used to surface websites in ChatGPT search, and that sites which block it are not shown in ChatGPT search answers (apart from plain navigational links). The GPTBot crawler is used for model training: blocking it does not remove a site from search. OpenAI also says ChatGPT search may rely on partner search providers and use an approximate location for local questions.
• Perplexity: PerplexityBot is used to surface and link websites in Perplexity results; Perplexity recommends allowing it in robots.txt to appear there.
• Google (AI Overviews, AI Mode): a page must be indexed and eligible to show with a snippet in Google Search. Google says there are no additional requirements, no special markup, and recommends keeping your Google Business Profile up to date.

How do you check whether a prospect is cited?

1. Write 5 to 8 realistic buyer questions for the trade and the city: "which {trade} in {city} for {need}?", "{trade} {city} with good reviews", "how much does {service} cost in {city}?".
2. Ask them with web search on, in a new conversation, in each assistant.
3. For each answer, note the sites cited as sources and the businesses recommended.
4. Count: on how many questions is the prospect's site cited? Which competitors come up instead?
5. Open their robots.txt ({site}/robots.txt) and look for OAI-SearchBot, PerplexityBot or a User-agent: * rule that blocks everything.

Step 4 matters most: a single answer proves nothing, since two people asking the same question do not necessarily get the same sources.

What can keep a business from being cited?

Without speculating about algorithms nobody publishes, three causes can be checked:

• the site blocks the assistants' search crawlers in its robots.txt;
• the site is not indexed or ranks poorly on Google, while Google ties its AI features to indexing and ChatGPT can rely on partner search engines;
• the business information is incomplete: a Google profile without a website or hours, pages that do not clearly state the trade and the city.

How do you turn it into an opening line?

The fact must stay checkable by the prospect:

"I asked ChatGPT 6 questions like '{trade} in {city}': your site is not cited in any answer, {competitor} is cited in 4."

or, even stronger:

"Your robots.txt blocks OAI-SearchBot, the crawler ChatGPT uses for its web search."

The second is binary and can be confirmed in ten seconds. The first depends on when you asked: keep the screenshots so you can show them.

What you should not promise

OpenAI says there is no way to guarantee a top placement in ChatGPT results. No agency can therefore sell "being cited by ChatGPT" as a guaranteed outcome. What you can sell honestly: removing the verifiable blockers (crawlers, indexing, Google profile, service pages) and measuring citation frequency over time.

Can you measure this visibility across a whole campaign?

AutoLeads does not query ChatGPT or Perplexity directly. It makes an estimate: for each trade and city in a campaign, an agent writes 8 buyer questions and 4 best-practice questions, runs the matching web searches and records the sites an assistant would cite, plus up to 5 recommended local businesses. For each prospect, AutoLeads then shows on how many of those questions its site appears and which competitors are cited instead. Answers are kept for 30 days per trade and city.

It is a starting point for the message, to confirm by hand in the assistant of your choice before quoting it. See pricing, and the other signals in the Google profile audit and Google and Meta ads.