How to get cited in Perplexity, Claude and Copilot

To get cited in Perplexity, Claude and Microsoft Copilot, let each one's search crawler read your site (PerplexityBot, Claude-SearchBot and Claude-User, and Bingbot for Copilot), make sure you are indexed in the search sources they use, and publish pages that answer specific questions with quotable facts. Of the three, only Copilot, through Bing, gives you a way to submit pages and see how often you are cited.

How do Perplexity, Claude and Copilot find sources?

Here is a robots.txt that lets all three read your site while keeping the training crawlers out. Adjust it if you are happy to be used for training.

User-agent: PerplexityBot
Allow: /

User-agent: Claude-SearchBot
Allow: /

User-agent: Claude-User
Allow: /

User-agent: ClaudeBot
Disallow: /

User-agent: Bingbot
Allow: /

User-agent: *
Allow: /

Sitemap: https://www.example.com/sitemap.xml

Check the result with our free AI crawler checker, which reads your live robots.txt and shows which AI bots it lets in. Robots.txt is not the only gate: firewalls and CDN bot settings can block these crawlers too, as we explain in is Cloudflare blocking AI crawlers from your site?

How do you get cited by Perplexity?

Perplexity documents two agents on its crawler page. PerplexityBot "is designed to surface and link websites in search results on Perplexity" and, Perplexity says, is not used to crawl content for AI foundation models. Perplexity-User handles visits a user asks for and, because a person requested the fetch, generally ignores robots.txt. Perplexity recommends allowing PerplexityBot and its published IP ranges (perplexity.com/perplexitybot.json) and says robots.txt changes can take up to 24 hours to apply.

Perplexity shows its sources prominently and cites many per answer, which makes it the most citation-friendly of the three. It also tracks classic search more closely than ChatGPT does: in Ahrefs' August 2025 study of 15,000 prompts, 28.6% of the URLs Perplexity cited ranked in Google's top 10 for the query, against about 8% for ChatGPT. In practice, pages that already rank well for a specific question have a good chance of being cited.

1. Allow PerplexityBot in robots.txt and in your firewall.
2. Find questions where you rank on page one in Google Search Console and make sure each page answers the question in its opening lines.
3. Add dates, figures and named sources. Perplexity answers often quote a specific number or definition from a single source.
4. Keep pages fresh. Update the date only when you have changed the content.

How do you get cited by Claude?

Anthropic's crawler help page lists three bots, each with a different job:

• ClaudeBot collects web content that may be used for training. Blocking it signals your future material should be left out of training datasets.
• Claude-SearchBot "navigates the web to improve search result quality for users." Blocking it may reduce your visibility in Claude's search results.
• Claude-User fetches pages when a person asks Claude something that needs a website. Blocking it stops Claude retrieving your content for those questions.

Anthropic says its bots honor robots.txt, support the non-standard Crawl-delay directive, and that rules must be set on each subdomain you want covered. It also warns that blocking by IP address may not work reliably, so use robots.txt.

For the search side, Anthropic added Brave Search to its list of subprocessors in March 2025, as TechCrunch reported, and Simon Willison found Claude's cited results matched Brave's for the same search. Anthropic has not said how much weight Brave carries next to its own crawling. A quick check is to search for your key pages on Brave Search; if they do not show up there, that is one more reason Claude may not cite them.

1. Allow Claude-SearchBot and Claude-User. Decide separately about ClaudeBot.
2. Search Brave for your brand and your main service pages to see whether they are found.
3. Write the way Claude quotes: short, self-contained paragraphs that answer one question, with the conditions and caveats stated.
4. Ask Claude your customers' questions with web search on and note which sources it cites, then work on being mentioned in those.

SEO Rank Fixer's AI visibility check runs your saved prompts in Claude and ChatGPT with live web search and shows whether each answer names or cites you, and who it cites instead. It does not cover Perplexity or Copilot today.

How do you get into Microsoft Copilot answers?

Copilot is the assistant you have the most control over, because it leans on Bing. Microsoft has described its web answers as grounded in top Bing search results, with a list of the sources used. If Bing does not index a page, Copilot cannot cite it.

1. Verify your site in Bing Webmaster Tools (you can import it from Google Search Console) and submit your sitemap.
2. Turn on IndexNow so Bing hears about new and changed pages right away. Many CMSs and CDNs support it; see our IndexNow walkthrough.
3. Local businesses: claim your listing on Bing Places for Business so your address, hours and phone number are current.
4. Check the AI Performance report regularly and look at which grounding queries cite you.

The AI Performance report, launched in public preview in February 2026, shows total citations across Copilot, AI-generated summaries in Bing and some partner integrations, the pages cited, and a sample of the grounding queries behind them. In June 2026 Bing added Intents, Topics, Citation Share and period comparison. Bing is careful to say these are observational: citation counts do not indicate ranking, and the report does not show clicks.

Bing's own advice in the launch post is worth following for every assistant: keep content fresh, structure it with clear headings, tables and FAQ sections, back claims with evidence and examples, and keep text, images and video consistent about the same entities.

What content gets cited by all three?

Once access and indexing are in place, the content work is the same for every engine.

Our guides to answer engine optimization and generative engine optimization go deeper on each trait, and if ChatGPT is your priority, start with how to get recommended by ChatGPT.

How do you measure citations across assistants?

1. Pick 10 to 20 customer questions and run them in each assistant every few weeks, recording whether you are named or linked, and who else is.
2. In analytics, group referrals from perplexity.ai, claude.ai and copilot.microsoft.com into an AI channel. App traffic may arrive without a referrer, so treat these as a floor.
3. Use Bing Webmaster Tools' AI Performance report for Copilot citations.
4. Watch server logs for PerplexityBot, Claude-SearchBot and Bingbot. A crawler that never visits cannot cite you.

Should you publish an llms.txt file for these assistants? None of the three documents it as a signal; our review of whether llms.txt works covers the evidence. For definitions of the terms used here, see the glossary.