How to check if your website is cited by ChatGPT and Perplexity.
Instly Scout checks whether ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Claude name your site when buyers ask the questions your business is built to answer. The result is a single number: named in X of 20 answers. Here is what that number means and how to improve it.
Named in X of 20 AI answers.
Instly Scout runs five buyer questions across four AI engines (ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Claude) and counts how many answers name your site. 20 is the maximum. 0 means the engines have no reason to mention you yet.
Absent. No engine read a page on your site for any of the five questions.
Emerging. Named occasionally, not consistently. Single-reading counts at this range are within noise.
Visible. Named by multiple engines for multiple questions. A US medical practice we measured scored 11 of 20 (14 Aug 2026; name withheld).
instlyscout.com: 0 of 20 named (AI answer check, 28 Sep 2026). Published here as our own before state.
Five steps to check AI citations for your site.
Not industry keywords. The actual questions: "what is the best [category] tool in 2026?" or "how do I [solve the problem your product solves]?" These are the prompts you need to appear in.
Paste the question, read the answer, check the sources. Note whether your brand name appears in the answer text and whether your domain appears in the sources. Record the date.
5 questions x 4 engines = 20 answers. Count how many named you. This is your baseline. Instly Scout records this automatically with a timestamp so the number does not get overwritten.
Check that AI crawlers are allowed in robots.txt. Check that your site has a page that directly answers each question, with your brand name in the first sentence. Check your sitemap and llms.txt include those pages.
AI engines re-index on their own schedule. Allow 2 to 4 weeks after new content is indexed before expecting a change in the named-in-answers count.
Common reasons AI engines do not cite a site.
GPTBot, PerplexityBot, ClaudeBot and Google-Extended disallowed in robots.txt. The engine never reads the site, so it cannot cite it.
If no page directly answers "what is the best [your category] tool", the engine has nothing to quote. A homepage tagline is not a direct answer.
AI engines use llms.txt and sitemap.xml to discover what to read. A page that is not listed may never be crawled.
82% of the sources AI engines read in our baseline were independent articles, not vendor sites. If round-up articles do not mention your product, engines have no third-party evidence to cite.
Source mix from Instly Scout's own AI answer baseline (28 Sep 2026, 20 answers): competitors' sites 15%, independent articles 82%, social 3%.
AI citation questions answered.
What is the difference between being named and being cited?
Named means your brand appears in the answer text. Cited means your URL is listed as a source the engine read. A page can be read as a source without the brand being named in the answer. Instly Scout records both. Being named is the higher-value outcome: a buyer reading the answer sees your name.
How long does it take for content changes to appear in AI answers?
There is no published schedule. In practice, changes to well-indexed pages begin showing up in 2 to 6 weeks for Perplexity and ChatGPT Search, which use live web access. Claude and Gemini draw partly from training data, which updates on longer cycles. Measure at 4 weeks as a baseline.
Why does the count change between runs?
AI engines do not return deterministic answers. The same question on the same day can produce different source lists. Low counts (0 to 3) are within noise and should not be treated as significant. A change of 5 or more across multiple questions on the same run is more likely to be real.