What Happens When You Launch a Website Without Google or Bing? (AI Citation Test)

I conducted an indexing experiment for ChatGPT, and the results were a bit surprising.

My goal was to see whether OpenAI shows any kind of citation display without relying on Google or Bing.

I purchased a new domain. Normally, I use WordPress, but this time I wanted to try a different setup and reduce server MS latency, so I used Cloudflare Workers & Pages. I connected it to my GitHub and started building with Astro.

I generated 6 meaningless blog posts using AI and added them to the blog.

I didn’t care much about the title, meta description, or other on-page SEO specifically. I just wanted to be sure about my blog posts looking unique. The homepage and the /blog page title were the same.

Anyway, one of the questions in my mind was: What happens if I ping OpenAI’s web_search module? Would it work like submitting a URL in Search Console? Would there be any reaction within the first 24 hours?

Result: No. It failed.

I tried again for two more days and then gave up. I had added the content on July 8. I only used IndexNow. After 3 days, there were still zero indexed pages.

Today is July 18, and I decided to check again. I never verified the site with Google Search Console. I hadn’t added Google Analytics either, until today.

And yet… somehow, the site got indexed by Google and Bing.

Check my ChatGPT query here: https://chatgpt.com/share/687a0a32-641c-8011-8594-8f7b8e39eeb3

• Google: 3 pages
• Bing: 1 page (sometimes 2 pages, HTTP and HTTPS homepage results).
• ChatGPT (sources): 3 pages shown (Meta Descriptions are same as Google)

I can’t definitively say that ChatGPT only uses Google results, because I haven’t tested this with multiple websites.

But this is the outcome I have for now.

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