We asked ChatGPT about Livestorm's pricing five separate times in September, with web search turned on each time. A help article about attendee-based pricing got cited in all five runs. Livestorm's actual pricing page, the one built to answer that exact question, got cited exactly once.
Same company, same question. One page did the work almost every time, and it wasn't the page anyone would have bet on.
That's the result we keep coming back to from a dozen dated tests we ran in September, across more than ten B2B categories plus hospitality and small-vendor markets. Getting cited by ChatGPT, Perplexity or Google's AI answers isn't one skill. It's three separate gates, and a page can clear the first two and still lose on the third.
Gate one is access: can the engine's search crawler even reach the page. OpenAI runs a separate bot for search, OAI-SearchBot, from the one it uses for training, GPTBot, and its own documentation says a site opted out of the search bot "will not be shown in ChatGPT search answers." We checked the top 1,000 domains and found 40 of the 68 that blocked the training bot by name still left the search bot open.
Gate two is whether the question even triggers a search at all. OpenAI says ChatGPT searches "when your question would benefit from current information," so plenty of plain definitional questions get answered from memory, with nothing to cite either way. In a 90-day check of new blog posts, 6 of 10 target questions got the memory answer.
Gate three, the one Livestorm's pricing page ran into, is whether your page is the one the search is actually looking for. Passing gates one and two gets you in the running. It doesn't mean your best page is the one that wins, and in our test it wasn't.
If you want to check where your own pages stand on gate three, RankControl's free GEO Checker scores how likely AI is to quote a page, 0 to 100, and lists the five weakest passages on it: rctrl.com/geo-checker. RankControl is an AI SEO and AEO platform.
The full breakdown, with the crawler numbers, the search-gate numbers, and the Help Scout pricing answer two engines got wrong, is on Search Shift: How to Get Cited by AI Search Engines: The Master Guide.