How to get cited by Claude and Gemini, and how they differ from ChatGPT.

How to get cited by Claude and Gemini starts with the same content work as ChatGPT, but the access rules are different. Get those wrong and good content never reaches the answer.

Citations in ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini compared

How to get cited by Claude

Anthropic runs three bots. Blocking Claude-SearchBot stops indexing for search, which it says may reduce your visibility and accuracy in user search results. Blocking Claude-User means your content can't be retrieved for user queries. Blocking ClaudeBot signals that future material should be excluded from training.

User-agent: ClaudeBot
Disallow: /

User-agent: Claude-SearchBot
Allow: /

User-agent: Claude-User
Allow: /

That example opts out of training while staying searchable; repeat it on each subdomain. Anthropic also warns that blocking its IP addresses is not a reliable opt-out, because the bots then can't read your robots.txt.

Anthropic's API docs say Claude decides when to search based on the prompt, and that citations are always on for web search, each with the source URL and title. So your page title and URL show up alongside the answer: make them clear. Generate rules with the AI robots.txt generator.

How to get cited by Gemini

Google's docs for Grounding with Google Search say the model decides whether a search would help, generates one or more queries, then writes an answer with inline citations mapped to spans of text. That makes Google indexing the baseline. Google documents this for developers; we assume the Gemini app behaves similarly, but Google doesn't publish its full logic.

Check Google-Extended before anything else. Google says it manages use of your content for training Gemini models and for grounding in Gemini Apps and Grounding with Google Search on Vertex AI. It doesn't affect inclusion or ranking in Google Search, so a block can look harmless in your SEO reports.

For Google's AI features in Search, Google says a page must be indexed and eligible to show with a snippet, that no special schema or AI text files are needed, and that SEO best practices still apply. See how to appear in AI Overviews. For app listings, see the Gemini recommendations checklist.

What works on all three

1. Audit access per engine with the AI crawler checker, then check your CDN rules too.
2. Put the answer in server-rendered HTML, near the top of the section. See answer-first content.
3. Back claims with sources and numbers, the methods that did best in the GEO study.
4. Keep your entity consistent with the entity consistency checker.
5. Measure each engine separately with an AI share of voice count, since the same prompt can cite different sources.

For ChatGPT specifics, see how to get cited by ChatGPT.

Questions people ask

How do I get cited by Claude?

Allow Claude-SearchBot and Claude-User in robots.txt and at your firewall, then publish clear, well-sourced pages with descriptive titles. Claude's web search returns citations with the source URL and title.

Does blocking ClaudeBot stop Claude citing me?

Anthropic lists ClaudeBot as the training crawler. Search and user retrieval use Claude-SearchBot and Claude-User, so control those separately.

Does Google-Extended affect Gemini citations?

It can. Google says Google-Extended manages use of content for training and for grounding in Gemini Apps and Grounding with Google Search on Vertex AI. It doesn't affect Google Search.

Do I need different content for each AI engine?

Usually not. Access rules differ, but clear answers, evidence and consistent entity information help on all of them.