More researchers now ask ChatGPT, Claude or Perplexity before they search Google (we wrote about this trend). To answer, the AI reads your website. So here is a question worth asking: can it read the citations on your pages?
Unlike real human beings or Google’s crawler, most AI crawlers don’t run JavaScript on your page: they download your page, read the HTML, and likely find an empty box where your citations should be.
BizGenius’ dual rendering fixes this. Your web server puts the citations straight into the page HTML, and then the widget takes over in the browser exactly as before. Same widget, same look, and now everyone (humans, Google and AI) can read it.
A real example: List Labs
List Biological Laboratories uses our dual rendering. Here is their Pertussis Toxin product page as a human visitor sees it: 2,090 citations, each with the sentence from the paper where the product is named.
Does ChatGPT see the citations?
We asked ChatGPT:
“How many citations does List Labs show for its Pertussis Toxin, and what are the 3 most recent papers on that page?”
ChatGPT read the page and answered with the count, 2,090, and the three newest papers, exactly as the widget lists them. Its only source was the List Labs page.
For comparison, we asked a similar question about a product page that uses another vendor’s citation widget. ChatGPT’s reply: “The retrieved page contains no citations.”
Does Google see the citations?
We searched Google for the title of one paper on that page:
Google returns the Pertussis Toxin product page, with the paper’s title in the result. A researcher who looks up a paper can land right on the product that was used in it.
Friendly to humans, search engines and AI
| Other vendors | BizGenius without dual rendering | BizGenius with dual rendering | |
|---|---|---|---|
| People search, filters, paging | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ |
| SEO Google, Bing | ⚠️ Partially: Google doesn’t reliably index iframes. | ✅ | ✅ |
| AEO ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity | ❌ Empty box | ❌ Empty box | ✅ |
SEO is search engine optimization. AEO, answer engine optimization, is the same idea for AI assistants: making sure they can find and quote your content.
Next step:
Try it on your own site: ask ChatGPT how many citations one of your product pages shows. If it can’t find them, please contact us and we will help you.