A Machine Read Your Site Last Night

The Free Front Desk: An Indie Creator’s Playbook for AI Search — Went up last month with my own server logs as the receipts: machines reading this site sixty times a day, humans clicking through eleven times in six weeks. Today’s drill is the follow-up question that piece never answered, whether any of those machine reads turn into an actual citation. Full playbook, free, no gate.

The AI Citation Check

Google indexed you years ago. Nobody’s checking who’s citing you now.

Morning, fam. A different kind of search has been happening to your site, and no dashboard tells you about it. Every time somebody asks ChatGPT or Perplexity a question your content answers, a machine reads the page and either quotes you or skips you cold. No email. No notification. I went digging in my own server logs a while back (bored, not strategic) and found the machines reading this place way more than the humans clicking through it. Holy shit! Receipts are in the guide linked above. Today you find out which side you’re on. Here’s the drill.

1 // Ask the bots your own question

Open ChatGPT and Perplexity. Then run a Google search that triggers an AI Overview. Ask the exact buying-intent question your best page answers, typed plain and unpolished, the way somebody fumbling for an answer would. Note which tools name you and which ones don’t say a word.

2 // Check what the page hands them

Pull the page up cold. Look at the first 60 words under the headline. If a machine hunting for a citation can’t lift a clean paragraph from it, that’s the gap. The answer has to live at the top, ahead of three screens of wind-up.

3 // Confirm the schema’s there

Run the page through Google’s Rich Results Test. No FAQPage or Article markup means the machine’s reading raw HTML, no flags for question or answer. Most templates already carry the fields. Filling them in runs about five minutes.

4 // Rewrite one answer, re-ask this weekend

Rewrite the top paragraph of the page that matters most into one direct, quotable answer. Add real FAQ text if you don’t have any. Ask those three tools the same question again in 48 hours and see if anything moved.

Standard: no citation after one honest rewrite means that query isn’t a fit for that page. Pick a different one and move on. Don’t gut the whole fuckin’ site chasing one bot. Just sayin’.

Run the check today, then recheck Saturday to see if it moved.

THE TIP. The machine reading your page for a citation faces the same test as a human thumbing a feed: say one true thing fast, then shut up. Paragraphs of throat-clearing before the answer lose both readers, meat and machine alike. Damn near the whole craft is in the cutting. We wrote the manual on it. Cut Until It Bleeds: The Field Guide to Short-Form Writing (free)

DEAD AIR · CRAWLER LOG / CITATION MATCH

GPTBot pulled the article at 2:11 a.m., same as every night, and got the normal 200. Eleven minutes later the citation monitor logged a match: a chatbot had quoted the piece’s second paragraph, word for word, footnoted back to that same URL. The second paragraph on the live page does not say that. It says that in the draft sitting three revisions back in the CMS, the one nobody has published. The monitor has caught the same eleven-minute gap every night this week, and every night it quotes whatever the draft says by then.

Reply and tell me which tool actually cited you, if any. I’m curious how many of us are getting read by the machines and how many are getting ignored completely. ~ J.D.