How to tell whether ChatGPT will cite your page (and when it structurally won't)

Most AEO/GEO advice hands you a checklist: add structured data, write answer-first, put a date on it, get a score. You do all of it, and the AI answer still quotes someone else. The checklist skipped the only question that decides the outcome first: for this particular query, can an independent site get cited at all? Getting cited by ChatGPT, Perplexity, or Google's AI Overviews is a two-stage funnel, and the stages fail for completely different reasons. Grade your page without knowing which stage you're stuck at and you'll spend a day tuning headings on a page that was never eligible. Here's the model, and how to run the check yourself before you touch the formatting. Stage 1: eligibility — can the engine retrieve you at all? Answer engines are retrieval-augmented. Before anything gets generated, a retriever picks a small set of candidate pages. If you're not in that set, nothing about your writing matters. Three things decide it, and only some are visible in your HTML. The part you can check on-page — the hard disqualifiers: noindex . A <meta name="robots" content="noindex"> (or an X-Robots-Tag header) keeps you out of the indexes these engines lean on. Easy to ship by accident on a templated page. AI crawlers blocked in robots.txt . GPTBot, PerplexityBot, ClaudeBot, and Google-Extended are distinct user agents. A Disallow: / for any of them means that engine can't fetch you even if Googlebot can. Check each one by name: curl -s https://example.com/robots.txt | grep -iA2 -E 'GPTBot|PerplexityBot|ClaudeBot|Google-Extended' Content that only exists after JS runs. If your article body is injected client-side and the server returns an empty shell, a fetch-based crawler sees nothing. Compare raw HTML to rendered: curl -s https://example.com/post | grep -c "a distinctive sentence from your article" Zero means your content isn't in the served HTML. Server-render it or pre-render it. The part you cannot check on-page — and this is where honesty matters — is domain authori