Are Businesses Scraping AI Answers to Improve Their Chances of Being Cited?

WEST PALM BEACH, FL – Companies have spent years tracking where they appear in Google results. Now some are using automated tools to monitor what ChatGPT and Perplexity say about their businesses, their products and their competitors.

The goal is optimization: learn which brands appear in AI-generated answers, which sources those systems cite, and how a company might improve its chances of being included. The practice is commonly called generative engine optimization, or GEO.

A 2026 report from Decodo, a web-scraping platform, offers a signal that this work is gaining attention. ChatGPT ranked third and Perplexity fifth among the websites its customers scraped most often. The full list also includes search engines, social platforms, online retailers and developer sites:

The ranking reflects activity among Decodo’s own users, not scraping across the entire internet. Even with that limitation, it shows that some businesses are collecting AI answers as market data.

From tracking rankings to tracking answers

Traditional search optimization gives businesses familiar measures: rankings, clicks and impressions. AI answers can be harder to assess. A company may want to know whether a chatbot mentions it when someone asks for the best local provider, which competitors appear alongside it, or what information the system uses to describe its services.

Decodo says its users collect answer text, brand mentions, citations and source rankings from ChatGPT and Perplexity. The report describes businesses checking whether AI tools compare their products with competitors and identifying sources that appear repeatedly in answers. Some may then try to earn coverage or citations from those sources.

That makes AI-answer monitoring a new form of competitive research. A company that is missing from relevant recommendations may look for gaps in its public information, strengthen pages that explain its products and services, or seek visibility on sources AI systems cite.

Monitoring can reveal patterns, not the full explanation

Repeatedly asking similar questions can show whether a business appears more or less often, how descriptions change, and which sources recur. That information may help marketers decide what to investigate or improve. But a scrape is a snapshot of an answer. It does not reveal exactly why a model produced that response, and it cannot prove that a particular website change caused a business to be recommended. Results may vary with the wording of the prompt, the platform, the timing and other factors. Monitoring can help identify patterns, but it does not provide a guaranteed formula for influencing an AI system.

The distinction matters because GEO claims can sound more certain than the evidence allows. Tracking mentions and citations is measurable. Promising that a specific optimization will make a chatbot recommend a business is a much stronger claim.

A new visibility metric for businesses

Decodo’s report places ChatGPT and Perplexity among a varied group of heavily scraped platforms, alongside TikTok, Google, Naver, Amazon, GitHub and Stack Overflow. Its category data says AI answer engines and search together represented 46% of requests in the report’s breakdown. Those figures reflect Decodo’s customer activity, rather than a market-wide census.

Still, the appearance of AI platforms in the ranking points to a change in what some companies want to measure. They are not only asking where their websites rank. They are also asking what prospective customers may hear when they ask an AI system for advice.

As AI answers become another place where consumers discover and compare businesses, companies will have good reason to monitor them. The challenge is turning those observations into useful work without mistaking correlation for control.

John Colascione

John Colascione is Chief Executive Officer of SEARCHEN NETWORKS®, a digital marketing and technology company founded in 2001. An entrepreneur, author, and digital publisher with more than 25 years of experience, he specializes in search engine marketing, Website Monetization, domain names, and online business development. He is the author of Mastering Your Website and publishes commentary on technology, digital marketing, and the evolving Internet economy. Read more at JohnColascione.com.