{"pageUrl":"https://promagen.com/chatgpt-vs-perplexity-for-citations","lastModified":"2026-05-10","provenanceHash":"sha256:f4fe2760de957e79824c4bb31f68336cbb5ef8b91392441dd4389df6737a793a","provenanceNote":"Bot user-agent strings and robots.txt compliance are sourced from each vendor's published crawler documentation. Citation density and per-engine citation behaviour describe observable product UI as of 2026-05-10; vendors do not publish internal retrieval or ranking algorithms.","claims":[{"id":"claim-perplexity-cites-by-design","statement":"Perplexity's answer interface displays numbered source citations on every answer as a product design decision; citations are visible by default in the standard Perplexity UI.","evidenceUrl":"https://www.perplexity.ai","lastVerified":"2026-05-10","hash":"sha256:931e64f279ea93a58722d2d3221a34f5792eb772488d082dac8f0034acab7ed5"},{"id":"claim-chatgpt-bot-list-documented","statement":"OpenAI publicly documents two autonomous crawlers — GPTBot (model training) and OAI-SearchBot (ChatGPT Search retrieval) — that honour robots.txt allow/disallow rules. OpenAI also documents ChatGPT-User as a user-triggered fetcher invoked by user action in ChatGPT; OpenAI's bot documentation calls out that robots.txt rules may not apply to user-initiated requests in the same way as to autonomous crawling.","evidenceUrl":"https://platform.openai.com/docs/bots","lastVerified":"2026-05-10","hash":"sha256:0216d7c6d1b3dfa3f1d79e443a03368774d6328d0b0cf47a80f7148e945a5179"},{"id":"claim-perplexity-bot-vs-user","statement":"Perplexity publicly documents PerplexityBot as its autonomous citation indexer, controlled by robots.txt. Perplexity-User is a user-triggered fetcher; Perplexity has stated that Perplexity-User generally does not treat robots.txt as binding because the fetch is user-initiated.","evidenceUrl":"https://docs.perplexity.ai/guides/bots","lastVerified":"2026-05-10","hash":"sha256:bf9c4e3086e3d2e1d206a03ad7aee92047c48da428937a908e1bc3170aec3f36"},{"id":"claim-citation-counts-observable-not-contract","statement":"Per-answer citation density, click-through behaviour, and retrieval freshness are operationally observable but not documented as contracts by either OpenAI or Perplexity. Treat any specific \"average citations per answer\" or \"click-through rate\" claim as an observed pattern, not a guaranteed property.","evidenceUrl":"https://promagen.com/sentinel/weekly","lastVerified":"2026-05-10","hash":"sha256:d5168e5f6463839fbd36f578edba020c1885f5d7d4c25d932c6a93b365ec6f04"}]}