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.

You can leave your comments here on LinkedIn and X thread , also below(the comments section)

Launching without Google or Bing is the cleanest AEO experiment you can run. AI citations in ChatGPT, Perplexity and Gemini tell you whether the answer engine optimization layer works on its own. Treat the test as evidence that AEO has its own gravity.