How to Get Cited by ChatGPT — the Bing Index Nobody Talks About

The finding: ChatGPT's citations look a lot like Bing's results

In February 2025, Seer Interactive ran a careful test: they took 100 questions that triggered web searches in ChatGPT, then searched those same questions in Google and Bing and matched the citations to each engine's results. The result — 87% of SearchGPT's citations matched Bing's top organic results, compared with 56% for Google (across 500+ citations analyzed).

One important nuance, so we state it honestly: that study covered SearchGPT — ChatGPT's web-search mode — not every ChatGPT answer. When ChatGPT answers from its training data alone, no live index is involved. But whenever ChatGPT actually browses the web to answer a current, local question like "who's the best HVAC company in Las Vegas?", Bing is the index it's reading.

Why Bing? Follow the plumbing

This isn't a coincidence — it's architecture. Microsoft invested about $13 billion in OpenAI, and ChatGPT's web browsing runs on the Bing Search API. OpenAI even ships a dedicated crawler, OAI-SearchBot, separate from the GPTBot it uses for training — so a page that isn't crawlable and indexed on the Bing side simply can't surface in ChatGPT Search.

Here's how the major assistants actually source the web, because it changes your strategy:

• ChatGPT Search → Bing's index (via the Bing Search API).
• Microsoft Copilot → Bing's index.
• Perplexity → its own proprietary index (reported at 200+ billion URLs), with a live search on every query.
• Google Gemini / AI Overviews → Google's own index (Googlebot).

So two of the biggest assistants — ChatGPT and Copilot — depend on Bing. Yet Bing holds only about 7.4% of U.S. search market share, which is exactly why most local businesses never set it up. That neglect is your opening.

The step almost no one does: claim Bing + turn on IndexNow

Two free actions put you in the index that ChatGPT and Copilot read.

1) Bing Webmaster Tools. Claim your site (you can import directly from Google Search Console) and submit your sitemap. As of February 2026, Bing Webmaster Tools even added an AI Performance report that shows how often your pages are cited in Copilot and Bing's AI answers, the exact queries, and the trend over time — visibility no other engine gives you yet.

2) IndexNow. IndexNow is an open protocol co-developed by Microsoft Bing and Yandex that lets you instantly notify search engines the moment a page is added or changed, instead of waiting for a crawler to find it. It can cut indexing time from weeks to hours or days, and when one participating engine gets the ping, it shares the signal with the others (Bing, Yandex, Seznam, Naver, Yep). One caveat worth knowing: Google does not support IndexNow — this is a Bing-and-friends advantage, which is fine, because Bing is the index feeding the AI assistants.

A practical checklist for a local contractor

You don't need a developer for most of this:

• Claim Bing Webmaster Tools and submit your sitemap (import from Google Search Console in two clicks).
• Enable IndexNow so new and updated pages get pushed to Bing immediately.
• Claim Bing Places for your business (the Bing equivalent of a Google Business Profile) so your local details are consistent there too.
• Keep your entity clean — same name, address, phone, and structured data everywhere, so the page Bing indexes clearly describes a real Las Vegas business. That's what makes AI confident enough to name you.

It's an afternoon of work, it costs nothing, and it targets the exact index behind ChatGPT and Copilot. For a Las Vegas HVAC, plumbing, or electrical shop, that's the cheapest AI-visibility win available.