AbstractWe consider integer‐valued processes with a linear or nonlinear generalized autoregressive conditional heteroscedastic models structure, where the count variables given the past follow a Poisson distribution. We show that a contraction condition imposed on the intensity function yields a contraction property of the Markov kernel of the process. This allows almost effortless proofs of the existence and uniqueness of a stationary distribution as well as of absolute regularity of the count process. As our main result, we construct a coupling of the original process and a model‐based bootstrap counterpart. Using a contraction property of the Markov kernel of the coupled process we obtain bootstrap consistency for different types of statistics.