Three things have to happen before a new page is cited: an index has to contain it, the assistant's search has to retrieve it for the question, and the model has to choose it over the other pages it retrieved. Each assistant does the first step differently.
Perplexity searches on every question and reads live. Its crawler documentation says changes can take up to 24 hours to be reflected. In our check on 2026-10-21 it cited 10.0 sources per answer, so it has room for a new page.
ChatGPT searches when it decides the question needs it. OpenAI's crawler page says a robots.txt change takes about 24 hours to reach search, and gives no figure for new pages. OpenAI also uses Bing, so a page Bing has indexed is a page ChatGPT can find. In our run ChatGPT cited fewer than two sources per answer, so being retrievable is not enough; the page has to beat official documentation.
Gemini and Google AI Overviews work from Google's index. Google's AI features page says a page is eligible once it is indexed and can be shown with a snippet, with no extra steps. Indexing time is whatever Google gives your site, from hours to weeks.
Claude searches when it chooses to. It cited sources on 13 of our 25 questions and answered the rest from memory, so for some questions no new page will be cited until the next model.
What to do
Submit the URL to Bing through IndexNow and to Google through your sitemap on the day you publish. Then ask the question you wrote the page for, in a fresh session on each assistant, once a week, and write down the first date each one cites you. That number, for your site, is the only honest answer to this question. We will add our own first-citation dates from this site's pages once they have been live for a month.
