Will ChatGPT and Perplexity actually cite your page?

It is how easy your page is for AI answer engines — ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews — to crawl, understand, and quote as a source. A page can rank fine in classic search and still be invisible in AI answers because its structure makes extraction hard. This tool checks the on-page signals that decide whether your page is liftable: title, headings, answer-first paragraphs, structured data, and crawl directives.

I run 10 weighted checks against the HTML you paste — title tag, meta description, H1 count, JSON-LD structured data, question-style H2s, answer-first paragraphs, tables and lists, image alt coverage, schema completeness, and indexability. Checks that matter more for extraction carry more weight, and everything sums to 100. It all runs in your browser — your HTML never leaves the page.

Answer engines lift short, self-contained passages. When the paragraph right under your heading answers the question in roughly 40-60 words, an engine can quote it without stitching fragments from across the page. Pages that bury the answer three scrolls down force the model to paraphrase from somewhere else — usually a competitor who answered faster.

FAQPage, Article, Product, and HowTo are the types this checker looks for, because they map directly to the question-answer and entity formats AI systems consume. Structured data is the difference between an engine guessing what your page is about and being told. Completeness matters too — an Article without author and datePublished is a weaker trust signal than a full one.

Effectively, yes. Most AI answer systems are built on top of search indexes or crawls that respect robots directives, so a noindex keeps you out of the pool of pages they can cite. It is the hardest fail in this checker: if the page is noindexed, nothing else on the list matters until that directive is removed.

No. Paste mode inspects your actual markup; the quiz relies on what you believe is on the page, so its result is marked "est." and self-reported. Use the quiz when you cannot get the source easily, then re-run paste mode once you can. An honest answer beats a flattering one either way.

Yes. Structured facts — a comparison table, a numbered list of steps, a bulleted spec list — are the easiest thing for an answer engine to extract verbatim and attribute to you. Long unbroken prose makes the model work harder and quote less. If your page has facts, give them structure.

They help. The crawlers that feed AI answers read text, so an image without an alt attribute is a blank spot in your content. Good alts describe what the image shows and carry context the surrounding copy may not. They are also an accessibility requirement, so this fix pays twice.

Work the "top 5 fixes" list in order — it is ranked by the weighted points each gap costs you, so fix #1 always moves the score most. The pages I check most often fail on the same three things: no JSON-LD, no answer-first paragraph, and multiple H1s. If you want a second set of eyes, book a free 30-minute call and I will go through your page live.

Mandeep Singh, founder of Sprout Sage Solutions. I do SEO and AI-search visibility work for service businesses and Shopify stores, and I built this because clients kept asking "will ChatGPT recommend us?" and there was no honest, free way to check the page-level basics. This runs in your browser, costs nothing, and tells you the truth.