How to Get Cited by LLMs: 9 Common Mistakes to Avoid

Most brands that are never cited by LLMs are making a few fixable mistakes: their pages cannot be crawled, their content is too general, their key answers are buried, or nobody else on the web talks about them. Getting cited means being a clear, reachable and credible source for a specific question. Here are nine mistakes we see often, with the fix for each.

Mistake 1: Blocking the Crawlers You Need

Some sites block bots broadly in robots.txt or through security settings, sometimes without the marketing team knowing. Check which crawlers you block and decide deliberately. If AI search crawlers and search engine bots cannot read your pages, they cannot cite them.

Mistake 2: Writing for Everyone

A page titled “Our Services” that lists twelve things in two lines each answers no question well. Assistants look for the best answer to a specific question. Fix: create focused pages, such as “Emergency boiler repair in Leeds: response times and costs”.

Mistake 3: Burying the Answer

Long introductions about company history before the actual answer make extraction harder. Fix: put a direct two- or three-sentence answer at the top of each page.

Mistake 4: Hiding Key Facts in Images and PDFs

Price lists as images, opening hours in a banner graphic, specifications only in a downloadable PDF. Fix: put important facts in plain HTML text as well.

Mistake 5: Inconsistent Brand Facts

Different prices on your site and on a marketplace, an old address on a directory, two versions of your company name. Assistants may repeat the wrong version or avoid naming you. Fix: one fact sheet, applied everywhere.

Mistake 6: No Third-Party Validation

If the only source that says you are good is your own website, assistants have little reason to recommend you in comparison answers. Fix: earn genuine reviews, press mentions and listings on respected industry sites.

Mistake 7: Using Shortcuts That Backfire

Fake reviews, planted forum comments, bought links and copied content can get removed, penalised or exposed publicly. Fix: put that budget into real content and real customer outreach instead.

Mistake 8: Never Updating

An article from three years ago with old prices and discontinued products is a weak source. Fix: review your most important pages every few months and show a real “last updated” date.

Mistake 9: Not Measuring, or Measuring Once

Checking one prompt in one assistant once tells you very little, because answers vary. Fix: track a fixed list of prompts across several assistants over time, and look for trends. Our page on tools for LLM citation tracking outlines your options.

A Quick Self-Audit

• Can I find my main answer in the first three sentences of each key page?
• Is all important information in plain text?
• Do my profiles all say the same thing?
• Has anyone credible written about us in the last year?
• Do I know which prompts mention us today?

If you answered “no” to two or more, start there. For a ranking of what to work on first, read the best ways to get cited by LLMs.

How Keboost Helps

Keboost shows where you are and are not mentioned across ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Perplexity and Copilot, which competitors and sources appear instead, and creates focused content to fix the gaps. Run a free AI visibility check to see which of these mistakes affect you.