Cloudflare has piloted a system with OpenAI that helped ChatGPT Search discover and index hundreds of millions of web pages it had not previously seen. Cloudflare's network signals flag new or changed pages and help OpenAI's crawler avoid dead URLs. OpenAI still applies its own ranking systems, and site owners' crawler controls and robots.txt rules remain in force (Cloudflare/OpenAI announcement).
The detail to note is that this is a pilot outcome, not a permanent platform-wide change. Even so, it matters for GEO. If it scales, the pool of pages eligible for ChatGPT citations could grow considerably, and discovery would depend less on being linked from elsewhere on the web and more on being crawlable, freshly updated and clearly authoritative. Coverage of the broader AI-search landscape has been tracking the same shift (AI Search Brief).
For site owners, the practical takeaway at Citeify is to treat crawler access as a foundation rather than an afterthought. Check that AI crawlers aren't being blocked by accident in robots.txt or at the CDN layer, keep sitemaps and lastmod dates accurate so changes are picked up quickly, and make sure key pages are clear, self-contained and easy to attribute. Discovery is improving, but being indexed is still not the same as being cited. That's the gap a GEO audit is designed to close.