How to get cited by ChatGPT — it runs on Bing, not Google

The single most common reason a business is not cited by ChatGPT: it is indexed by Google and not by Bing. ChatGPT Search retrieves from the Bing index. Your Google ranking is, for this purpose, irrelevant.

Updated 14 July 2026 · Dubai · Get AI Cited Technology (DET licence 1635658)

The short answer

To get cited by ChatGPT, get into the Bing index. ChatGPT Search retrieves from Bing — analysis by Seer Interactive found roughly 87% of ChatGPT citations matched Bing’s top results. So the first and largest lever is not your website design, your schema or your Google rank. It is whether Bing Webmaster Tools shows your pages as indexed. If it shows zero, ChatGPT structurally cannot cite you, and nothing else you do will change that.

Which search index each AI engine uses to choose citations Diagram showing that ChatGPT and Microsoft Copilot read the Bing index, Google Gemini and Google AI Overviews read the Google index, Perplexity reads its own index, and Anthropic Claude reads the Brave Search index. To get cited by an AI engine you must first be in the index that engine reads. Which index does each AI engine read?You cannot be cited by an engine whose index you are not in.ChatGPTCopilotGemini / AI OverviewsPerplexityClaudeBING INDEXChatGPT + CopilotGOOGLE INDEXPERPLEXITY INDEXBRAVE INDEXTo get cited by AI:1. Be IN the index that engine reads2. Answer the question the model rewrites3. Be quotable in one clean sentence4. Be an unambiguous entity
Which search index each AI engine uses to choose citations — Get AI Cited (getaicited.ai), Dubai.

How to get cited by ChatGPT, step by step

  1. Verify your site in Bing Webmaster Tools. Free. Submit your sitemap. Check Site Explorer → Indexed URLs. If it says no data, that is your entire problem, and it is the only one worth solving this month.
  2. Push IndexNow. Bing accepts instant URL submission via the IndexNow protocol. It costs nothing and it is the fastest signal available.
  3. Allow OAI-SearchBot and GPTBot in robots.txt. Blocking them — often unintentionally, via a plugin default — makes citation impossible.
  4. Answer-shape the page. ChatGPT rewrites the user’s question into its own search query, then quotes the page that answers it most directly. Put a clean, self-contained, factual answer in the first 60 words.
  5. Be corroborated. ChatGPT leans heavily on Wikipedia and Reddit. Independent third-party pages that name you and your URL together matter more than anything on your own site.
  6. Check your entity is unambiguous. If a similarly named company exists, ChatGPT will frequently substitute it. Publish a clear disambiguation page and consistent structured data.

Watch out for this

Bing will often crawl a new site cleanly and still index nothing for weeks. Crawled-with-zero-errors but zero indexed pages is a trust delay, not a technical fault. There is no shortcut past it, and anyone selling you one is selling you the wait.

Do not confuse readable with findable

Schema markup, clean HTML and a fast site make you readable once an engine arrives. They do not make you findable. Findability is decided by the Bing index — and if you are not in it, none of the on-page work can help you. Fix the index first. Everything else is downstream.

See which index every AI engine reads →

Get AI Cited (getaicited.ai) is a Dubai-licensed AI-visibility service (Get AI Cited Technology, DET licence 1635658). We do not guarantee rankings or citations — AI answers are controlled by the engines and change day to day. What we commit to is a published method, multi-run measurement and dated logs.

Frequently asked

How do I get cited by ChatGPT?

Get into the Bing index. ChatGPT Search retrieves from Bing, and analysis by Seer Interactive found roughly 87% of ChatGPT citations matched Bing's top results. Verify your site in Bing Webmaster Tools, submit your sitemap, push IndexNow, allow OAI-SearchBot and GPTBot in robots.txt, and put a clean factual answer in the first 60 words of the page.

Does ChatGPT use Google?

No. ChatGPT Search retrieves from the Bing index, not Google's. A business can rank well on Google and be entirely invisible to ChatGPT.

Why does ChatGPT not know my company exists?

Most often because Bing has not indexed your site. A secondary cause is entity ambiguity: if a similarly named company exists, ChatGPT may substitute it for yours.

How long does it take to get cited by ChatGPT?

We do not publish a timeline, and we would be cautious of anyone who does. Bing indexing alone can take weeks for a new domain, and in our testing AI answers move on their own about 27.8% of the time, which makes short-term claims unreliable.

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