Reviews in AI search: what ChatGPT and Perplexity cite

Can AI answers see your reviews?

More shoppers now ask ChatGPT or Perplexity which product to buy, and you would like your good reviews to count in that answer. But an AI answer is assembled from the pages the engine read for that question. If it never read your reviews, they play no part, however many you have.

So the useful question is which pages the engines actually read and cite. We cannot answer that for every shop, but we can show you what we counted in our own data, and then the things a store can check without guessing.

Which review sites do ChatGPT and Perplexity cite?

Twice in October we asked the same 20 buying questions in Perplexity, ChatGPT search and Google, and recorded every cited source. The questions are about our own market, online form tools, such as “formspree alternatives” and “free form backend”. They are product questions, but the products are software, not things you put in a shopping cart. Keep that in mind when you read the numbers.

Perplexity was the engine that used review sites. On 29 October it cited G2, Capterra, Slashdot or SourceForge in 4 of 19 answers, up from 2 of 19 two weeks earlier, and directories like AlternativeTo in 6. ChatGPT search cited none of these in any of its 40 answers across both runs. Its sources were mostly form vendors' own sites, 103 of its 136 links in the first run, many of them “alternatives” pages one company wrote about its rivals. Google's page 1 leaned on Reddit, in 13 of 20 results both times.

Two runs of 20 questions are a small sample, and the method changed a little between them. ChatGPT went from a paid account to a free one, and Perplexity from logged out to signed in, showing up to 15 sources instead of 10. So read the direction, not the exact counts. What held in both runs is that the review platforms were a minority source everywhere, and absent from ChatGPT's answers.

What got our own pages cited?

formgong.com was cited in 2 of the 59 answers and result pages on 13 October and in 5 of 59 on 29 October. Four of the five were Perplexity, one was ChatGPT, and Google stopped showing us on page 1 for both queries where it had. The Perplexity citations went to pages where we had tested something ourselves: a GDPR form backend guide, a side-by-side test of two services, an error guide written from reproducing the error. Our “alternative to” sales pages were cited nowhere.

For a store, the same pattern suggests that specific, checkable content about a product, such as real reviews with real details, has a better chance than marketing copy. It is also why an AI review summary on your page should only say what the reviews say. That is our reading of our own pages, not a rule the engines publish.

Can the AI search crawlers reach your store?

Each AI search product sends its own crawler, and a robots.txt written years ago may block it by accident. We read each company's crawler page on 2 November 2026. OpenAI's page on its crawlers says OAI-SearchBot “is used to surface websites in search results in ChatGPT's search features”, and sites that block it are not shown in ChatGPT search answers. Perplexity's crawler page says PerplexityBot “is designed to surface and link websites in search results on Perplexity” and recommends allowing it in robots.txt. Neither of these is the crawler that collects training data. OpenAI's GPTBot is a separate name, so you can allow search and still opt out of training.

Google needs nothing extra. Its page on AI features says “There are no additional requirements to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode”, and that a page must be indexed and eligible to be shown with a snippet. It also says there is no special structured data you need to add for them.

Is the review text in your page's HTML?

Many review widgets, ours included, load the reviews with JavaScript after the page arrives. Google's JavaScript SEO guide says a headless Chromium “renders the page and executes the JavaScript” before indexing. The OpenAI and Perplexity crawler pages say nothing about running scripts, so the safe test is to look at the raw HTML yourself. Pick a sentence from one of your reviews and search for it in what the server sends.

# What does a crawler get from your product page, before any script runs?
PAGE="your product page address"
SITE="your store's address, without a path"
curl -s -A "OAI-SearchBot" "$PAGE" | grep -c "Love the weight of this board"

# 0 means the review text is not in the HTML the page sends.
# Then look at robots.txt for the AI search crawlers:
curl -s "$SITE/robots.txt" | grep -i -A2 -E "OAI-SearchBot|PerplexityBot"

How do your reviews reach the pages AI engines read?

Perplexity, the one AI engine in our runs that cited review platforms, used them next to vendor pages for comparison questions. For a shop the closest equivalents to G2 are Google's own product ratings, which come from a product review feed in Merchant Center, and marketplaces or review sites where your products are listed. Our guides to the Merchant Center product reviews feed and to review syndication cover both.

Review schema is still worth having for the star ratings in ordinary Google results, as our review schema guide shows. Just do not expect it to put you into an AI Overview by itself, since Google says the AI features need no special markup.

What does Formgong do for this?

Formgong Reviews, with its review widget, helps with the review text in your HTML and with the feed. On a Shopify store it adds Product JSON-LD built from your visible, approved reviews, and skips it when the theme already prints a rating. For Shopify and WooCommerce stores it serves a Google product reviews feed with your approved, written reviews and product data taken from the store itself, never from the review post. You can also turn on a public review page that the server renders without any script, so its reviews are in the HTML for every crawler. It stays out of search until it has an approved review.

Yotpo's article on reviews syndication and AI search visibility (last updated 20 October 2026) also points stores to Merchant Center review feeds and stresses Google's is_incentivized_review tag for reviews collected with a reward, then presents its Yotpo Discover tool for the rest. Formgong's feed sets that tag on reviews left while a review coupon was on, and the feed comes with the free plan.

The same kit gives you the form backend, website templates with the form already wired in, and a help chat that can answer from your reviews. The Google reviews docs show the feed setup, and you can start from the Formgong home page.

Have you seen your reviews in an AI answer?

If ChatGPT, Perplexity or Google's AI Overview quoted your product reviews, or ignored them, tell us at support@formgong.com with the question you asked. Shop queries are the part our own data does not cover, and we would like to count them next.

What Formgong Reviews includes for free

• Unlimited review sites and reviews. Text, photo, video and voice reviews on Free.
• A widget with no view limit. The review widget, carousel, badge and stars in product lists load as often as your pages do.
• Review emails in your store's name. Sent after each order with your logo and colours, replies to you, no email service to set up; buyers can rate inside Gmail without leaving the email, and get one reminder (how it works).
• Bring your old reviews. Import from Judge.me, Yotpo, Loox, Shopify Product Reviews, WooCommerce, Etsy or a CSV.
• You decide what shows. Approve each review or choose a publishing mode, reply in public or in private, and let shoppers ask the author a question.
• Google. A Merchant Center review feed, and product rating markup through the WordPress plugin.
• Reviews from your form. People who filled in your contact form can get a review request automatically.
• One account for the rest. Contact forms with Telegram and Google Sheets, an AI help chat, and free website templates.