Each AI assistant chooses and links sources differently. Here's how the major ones decide, and how to check whether they're citing you rather than your competitors.
Showing up in an AI assistant's answer is not the same as being crawled, and not every assistant plays by the same rules. Some — ChatGPT Search, Perplexity, Google's AI Overviews, Copilot — retrieve live pages and cite them with clickable links, so a citation can send real referral traffic. Others lean on what the model already absorbed during training, where you might be named with no link at all. A few do both, switching between live search and training memory depending on the question.
That means the work of getting cited looks different for each engine: the page that earns a Perplexity citation may be invisible to Copilot, and opting out of one company's training crawler can change your AI visibility without touching your normal Google ranking. Each guide above breaks down how that specific assistant chooses sources, whether it links them, and how to check — with evidence rather than a guess — whether it is citing you or a competitor.
Looking for who's crawling your site instead? See the AI crawler directory. Choosing a tool? See how Unsourced compares with other AI visibility tools.
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