# How to Get Cited by ChatGPT and Perplexity | Infiscroll

> Let the AI crawlers in, answer in 40-60 words, be discussed off-site. Where the evidence on schema disagrees, how long it takes, what it costs in Pune.

Source: https://infiscroll.com/blog/how-to-get-cited-by-chatgpt-perplexity/

Let the crawlers in, answer the question in the first 40 to 60 words, put a checkable fact in the passage, and be discussed somewhere that is not your own website. That much the market agrees on. It disagrees sharply about schema, and the three most credible answers to that question come from three different searches, which is what this page is for.
By Infiscroll · Published 29 June 2026 · Updated 9 August 2026

## What actually gets you cited?

Four things, and the first one is the most likely to be silently broken. The list below is the same four that Google’s AI Overview publishes for this question, reordered by how often each one is the actual blocker rather than the actual improvement.
- Let the crawlers in. Your robots.txt must not block PerplexityBot or OpenAI’s OAI-SearchBot , which fetch live pages while an answer is being written. Page speed matters here for a mechanical reason rather than a ranking one: the retrieval happens while the user waits, so a page that times out is skipped rather than penalised. Three of the six agency pages ranking for this question cover this, and Google’s own AI Overview leads with it.
- Answer in the first 40 to 60 words under a heading phrased as the question somebody actually asks. Engines lift passages, not pages, so the answer has to be the passage.
- Put a checkable fact inside that passage : a named source, a number, a date. Vague claims are not quotable, because an engine repeating them inherits a risk it cannot verify.
- Be discussed somewhere that is not your own website. Engines cross-check what you say about yourself against what other people say about you.
All four follow from how these systems work: they retrieve live pages and write an answer grounded in them, a process called retrieval-augmented generation, which the GEO post takes apart properly.
That is the agreed part. The disagreement starts at the next question, and it is worth more than the agreement.

## Does schema actually get you cited?

The three most credible answers to that question contradict each other , and they came from three different searches, which is the only reason they can be read side by side here. Each was the highest-quality evidence on its own result page, and none of those pages contains the other two.
Source
What it found
Evidence behind it
A practitioner in r/localseo
Schema barely moved the needle; the brands being recommended were the ones mentioned in threads, comparison articles and review sites
Reports tracking about 25 brands across ChatGPT, Perplexity and Gemini
Practitioners in r/GrowthHacking
Schema is underrated and was the unlock: one reports going from zero citations to consistent mentions in Perplexity after cleaning up markup; another reports 30-plus pages being cited
Three months of testing across an agency’s own sites, plus replies
Google’s documentation
Structured data is not required for generative features and there is no special markup to add, while remaining worth keeping for rich results in ordinary search
Google’s own systems
Two of those are practitioner reports rather than studies, with samples of roughly 25 brands and one agency’s sites, so neither settles anything on its own. What is striking is that both were arrived at by testing, and they point in opposite directions.
The resolution is inside the second thread, in a reply pushing back on the person who started it: “FAQ sections can backfire if they’re the generic ‘what is X?’ filler that every SEO agency pumps out. The citations I’ve seen pulled tend to come from genuinely specific answers that aren’t available elsewhere. It’s less about structure and more about being the only source that answers a niche question well.”
That is Google’s own guidance about non-commodity content, reached independently by somebody who was reverse-engineering the behaviour rather than reading the documentation. And it explains the whole argument. Schema and formatting decide whether you can be quoted. Being the only place that says something decides whether you are worth quoting. Everybody in this argument is holding one half of that and calling it the answer.
For a business, the practical order follows: do the markup once, because it is cheap and it removes an obstacle, then spend the remaining effort on saying something nobody else on the internet is saying about your own trade.

## Is the advice to get mentioned on Reddit safe?

The channel every page here recommends is already being gamed, and Google’s own AI Overview is citing a thread where it is happening. This is worth knowing before you act on the fourth item in the first list.
The AI Overview for this search credits a single r/GrowthHacking thread as its source on two of its four recommendation blocks. That thread carries three promotional product drops in its replies: two for one tool, one for another, the last phrased as a complaint that nobody in the discussion had mentioned it. The advice being synthesised into Google’s answer is drawn from a conversation that is partly marketing.
Google’s documentation names this directly in its list of things that do not help: seeking inauthentic mentions . The qualifier is doing the work, and what generative engine optimization is covers the rest of that list.
The practical line between the two is simpler than it sounds. A comment that would still be useful with your brand name deleted is a genuine contribution; one that collapses without it is a product drop. The first earns the mention the engines are looking for. The second is what their spam systems exist to catch, and none of the six pages recommending forum presence mentions that the forums are already full of the second kind.

## Does it differ by engine?

Yes, measurably, and the best published comparison is not this one. A B2B agency ranking third for this search publishes a four-engine table drawn from SERanking’s 2026 citation research, covering sources per answer, freshness bias, format preference and index scope. If you want the full picture, that is where it is.
One finding from it is worth carrying here because it changes what a new site should expect. Perplexity favours younger domains, roughly ten to fifteen years old, where Google’s AI Overviews favour fifteen and over , so a young business is likelier to earn its first citation from Perplexity than from an AI Overview.
There is a structural reason to test there first as well. Perplexity cites inline on nearly every query, averaging about five sources per answer against roughly ten for ChatGPT, which makes each of its citations worth more and makes it the easiest engine to check yourself against.
*The two engines behave differently. Source: SERanking's 2026 citation research, as published by the page ranking 3rd.*

## How long does it take?

One agency in this set publishes real figures: two to four weeks for schema and answer-block changes to be picked up on the next crawl, and four to eight weeks for a visible lift in citations. Those come from its own shipped work, which makes them the most concrete timeline available on this question.
Read them as one agency’s numbers from one set of pages rather than as a law. Citation sets move on their own schedule, and a month-to-month swing is normal rather than a sign that something has broken: the GEO post carries the measured figure for that volatility.
What makes any timeframe meaningful is the thing most people skip: a written baseline taken before anything changed. Ten questions, asked in each engine, dated, and kept. Without it, an improvement and a good week look identical.
*The only published timeline on this question. Source: One agency's figures, from its own shipped work.*

## What does it cost in Pune?

₹20,000 a month with a ₹20,000 one-time setup, GST excluded , as published on our pricing page and on the AEO and GEO services page . Not one of the six pages ranking for this question names a price for the work.
That is no longer a single observation. Across the three searches behind this small group of articles (what AEO is, what GEO is, and how to get cited) not one of twenty-two ranking pages publishes what the work costs. The only figure recorded anywhere in that set is a fifty-dollar monthly subscription to a monitoring tool, which prices the measurement rather than the work.
*Nobody in this corpus prices the work. Source: Counted across three searches: what AEO is, what GEO is, and how to get cited.*
The alternative is honest and it is free. The four things in the first section cost nothing but time, the checks listed in the GEO article cost nothing at all, and an owner who does both and keeps a dated record for two months will know whether paying anybody is worth it.

## Who is this actually for?

A business that already answers its customers’ questions somewhere a machine can read them. Everything above is about being quoted; none of it substitutes for having something worth quoting.
None of the six pages ranking for this question mentions India, an Indian city, or a rupee. That is the third search in a row where the corpus is written for somewhere else, but this time there is proof the gap is real rather than imagined: one of those pages scopes itself entirely to UK small business, asks what a UK small business should actually do, and ranks ninth with it. It is a good page, and it did for the United Kingdom exactly what nobody has done here.
A smaller sign that this subject is still settling: two of the ten results for this search answer a different question altogether, because the word “citation” has two meanings. One of them is a tool for generating academic references in APA format.
So the honest close. If a customer cannot get a straight answer out of your website today, no amount of markup will make a machine want to quote it. The shortest path to being cited is being the only place that answers the question properly, and for most businesses in Pune that begins with being findable at all . The other two parts of this picture are what AEO is and what GEO adds .
FAQ

## Getting cited: questions answered

Six questions, four of them taken from the questions Google lists under this search (getting cited by ChatGPT, getting cited in Perplexity, whether Perplexity shows its sources, and which engine cites more) plus schema and cost.
Allow OpenAI's OAI-SearchBot in robots.txt, answer each question in the first 40 to 60 words under a heading phrased as that question, include a checkable fact with a named source, and be discussed on sites other than your own.
The same four things, with one difference that favours newer businesses: Perplexity retrieves live for nearly every query, so PerplexityBot must not be blocked and slow pages get skipped while the answer is being written.
Yes. Perplexity cites inline and numbered on nearly every answer, which makes it the easiest engine to check whether your business is being cited at all.
Not better, but easier to earn and easier to measure. Research published by SERanking in 2026 puts Perplexity at roughly five sources per answer against about ten for ChatGPT, and finds Perplexity favours domains around ten to fifteen years old where Google's AI Overviews favour fifteen and over.
The evidence disagrees. Practitioners report both that schema was the unlock and that it barely moved the needle, while Google's documentation states structured data is not required for its generative features. Schema decides whether you can be quoted; being the only source answering a question well decides whether you are worth quoting.
Infiscroll charges ₹20,000 a month with a ₹20,000 one-time setup, GST excluded. Across the three searches behind these articles, none of the twenty-two ranking pages publishes what the work costs.

## Want to be the answer rather than read about it?

Infiscroll runs AEO and GEO in Pune at ₹20,000 a month with a ₹20,000 setup. A useful first message names the questions you want to be recommended for, and whether anyone has checked what the engines say about you today.