How do you get a brand cited by ChatGPT?
ChatGPT cites brands two ways: from what its underlying models learned during training, and — in search mode — from pages retrieved through its search index, which is built substantially on Microsoft Bing. That makes the practical checklist concrete: allow OpenAI's crawlers (GPTBot and OAI-SearchBot) in robots.txt, get your pages indexed in Bing quickly (IndexNow submits them in minutes), and publish pages that answer specific buyer questions directly enough to be quoted. Then measure whether it worked by asking repeatedly — single checks of a non-deterministic system mislead.
The crawler gate comes first because it is binary: if OAI-SearchBot cannot fetch your page, nothing downstream matters. OpenAI documents its bots and their user agents; a one-line robots.txt mistake — or a CDN bot rule you forgot — silently removes you from consideration. Check it before doing anything cleverer.
The Bing path is the underappreciated half. ChatGPT's search retrieval draws on Bing's index, so Bing Webmaster Tools and IndexNow — which pushes new URLs to Bing rather than waiting for a crawl — are directly an AEO channel, not a legacy SEO chore. A page that takes weeks to enter the index is a page that spends weeks unavailable to be cited.
What gets quoted is extractable answers: a direct response to the question in the first paragraph, question-shaped headings, and claims specific enough to be worth repeating. Model-knowledge citations move slower — they reflect your presence in the sources engines were trained on, which is earned through third-party coverage over months, not through your own site alone.
Sources
Last reviewed 2026-08-10. We revisit these when the underlying research changes.
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