How it discovers and cites pages
When ChatGPT browses the live web, it leans heavily on Microsoft Bing's search index to find candidate pages, then fetches and reads selected URLs with its own OAI-SearchBot and ChatGPT-User agents. Answers surface inline citations and a sources list that link back to the pages it actually opened. Practically, that means ranking in Bing and being crawlable by OpenAI's bots are both prerequisites for being cited.
What this means for getting cited
To be cited by ChatGPT Search, your page first has to be reachable through the index it draws on (Bing (plus OpenAI's own OAI-SearchBot crawler)) and crawlable by the relevant bots, then it has to answer the user's question clearly enough to be quoted. I test exactly these variables at HZ and publish what moves the needle.