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AI citability checker

Paste an article as text or HTML and see what in it is extractable and quotable: the opening, headings, paragraphs, sourced statistics, dates, byline and schema. Each check is labelled with its evidence tier. None is a proven citation factor, and there is no score.

These are heuristics on text structure. None of them is a proven AI citation factor, and passing them does not make a page more likely to be cited.

Fact controlled evidence exists Evidence correlational or partial Hypothesis asserted, untested Open evidence conflicts
    01 How to use it

    4 steps, no signup

    1. 01

      Paste the article

      Paste plain text, Markdown or the page HTML (view source and copy all). HTML also runs the schema, byline, outbound-link and snippet-control checks.

    2. 02

      Read each check on its own

      Every check reports what it found in your text, with examples. There is no total and no score, on purpose.

    3. 03

      Weigh it by evidence tier

      Each check carries a tier: Fact, Evidence, Hypothesis or Open. Most structure advice in this field is Hypothesis. Act on that knowingly.

    4. 04

      Edit for readers first

      Fix what also helps a human reader, such as a direct opening, sourced numbers and clear headings. Then re-paste to see what changed.

    What this AI citability checker does, and what it refuses to do

    Search for an AI citability checker and almost every result returns a number: a citation-readiness score out of 100, an AI visibility grade. None of them publishes evidence that its weights predict citations, because no such evidence exists. The checks those scores are built from are mostly reasonable writing advice, but adding guesses together does not turn them into measurement.

    This tool runs the same kind of checks on your text and stops there. Each check reports what it found, with examples from your page, and a label for how well supported the idea behind it is. The labels come from this site's GEO tactic evidence scoreboard, which grades every common tactic against the published research.

    The evidence tiers

    TierMeaningChecks in this tool
    FactA controlled test exists, or the platform documents the behaviourStatistics with sources, quotations, outbound citations, keyword stuffing, snippet controls
    EvidenceCorrelational or partial supportNone at the level of page structure
    HypothesisWidely asserted, no controlled test locatedAnswer-first opening, question headings, short paragraphs, lists and tables, definitions, dates, byline
    OpenEvidence points both waysSchema markup

    Note what "Fact" means here. The main controlled result is GEO: Generative Engine Optimization (Aggarwal et al., KDD 2024), which reports that its methods can raise visibility in generative engine responses by up to 40%, and that effectiveness varies by domain. Most of it was measured on GEO-bench with a GPT-3.5-based engine the authors built, with a smaller test on Perplexity.ai. It was not run on ChatGPT search or Google's AI features. It is the best evidence available and still a long way from a ranking factor.

    Most of the checklist is Hypothesis. Answer-first openings, question headings and short paragraphs appear in nearly every GEO guide. We have not found a controlled test of any of them. They may well help readers, which is reason enough to use them, but this tool will not tell you they get you cited.

    What each check looks for

    • Statistics with sources. Sentences with numbers or percentages, and whether the same sentence or paragraph names a source ("according to", "a study by", a link). An unsourced number is the most common problem in AI-search writing.
    • Quotations. Quoted passages with an attributed speaker or source nearby.
    • Outbound citations (HTML only). Links to other domains in the body.
    • Keyword stuffing. Any content word above 3% of all words. The threshold is ours; in the Princeton study, keyword stuffing scored below the unmodified baseline.
    • Snippet controls (HTML only). nosnippet, data-nosnippet and max-snippet, which Google documents as limiting what is shown from a page in Search.
    • Answer-first opening. Whether the first paragraph is short and makes a direct statement.
    • Question headings. The share of headings phrased as questions.
    • Self-contained paragraphs. Paragraphs over 120 words, and paragraphs that open with "This", "It" or "They" and so depend on the one before.
    • Lists and tables, definitions, dates, byline. Whether each is present, with examples.
    • Schema (HTML only). JSON-LD types found. Google says no special schema is needed for AI Overviews or AI Mode; whether it helps anywhere else is unresolved, as this site's schema and AI citations study explains.

    How to use the results

    Start with the Fact-tier checks. Every number in an article should have a source you can name, and if it does not, the fix is research, not formatting: this site's investigation of where AI SEO statistics come from shows how many widely quoted figures dead-end in a vendor blog. Then look at the Hypothesis checks as an editor would. A direct opening and a clear heading help the person reading. If they also help a retrieval system, good, but that has not been shown.

    If you want to know whether a change made a difference, measure it. Change one thing on a set of pages, leave a comparable set alone, and track citations over weeks. The scoreboard post describes a simple design, and how to get cited by ChatGPT covers what the evidence says about one engine in particular.

    Limitations

    The checks are pattern matching on text. They cannot judge whether a claim is true, whether a source is credible, or whether the page answers the question anyone is asking, which matter more than any structure. Plain-text input has no links or markup, so link, byline and schema checks may miss what the live page has. Paste HTML for the full set. Results in other languages than English will be unreliable, since the phrase patterns are English.

    Last checked and updated: . Everything on this page runs in your browser; nothing you enter is sent anywhere.

    FAQ

    Frequently asked questions

    How do I make my content more likely to be cited by AI?
    No one can promise it. The strongest evidence so far is a 2024 benchmark study (the Princeton GEO paper) in which adding quotations, statistics and cited sources raised a page's visibility in generated answers. Everything else, from question headings to schema, is either untested or contested. This checker labels each check with that evidence tier.
    What is AI citability?
    An informal name for how easy it is for an AI search system to lift a passage from a page and cite it: a clear claim, a source, a self-contained paragraph. It is not a metric any AI company publishes, and there is no standard way to score it.
    Why does this checker not give a score?
    Because a single number would imply the checks are known citation factors with known weights. They are not. Most are hypotheses. Adding them into one score would present guesses as measurement, which is exactly what this site's method rules out.
    Does schema markup help AI citations?
    Unclear. Google says there is no special structured data needed to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode. Observational tests disagree on whether schema helps elsewhere, so the checker marks it Open. Use schema for the rich results it is documented to support.
    Do question-style headings help AI Overviews?
    It is a widely repeated idea with no controlled test behind it that we could locate. Questions as headings can make a page easier to scan and match the way people phrase queries, which is a reason in itself, but treat any citation benefit as a hypothesis.
    Do statistics help content get cited by AI?
    In the Princeton GEO benchmark, adding statistics was among the methods that most improved visibility in generated answers. That was a controlled test on a research benchmark, not on ChatGPT or Google directly. Every statistic still has to be real and attributed to its source.
    Does content freshness matter for AI search?
    It is widely asserted and plausible for time-sensitive queries, but we have not located a controlled test showing that a visible date or update causes more AI citations. The checker reports dates it finds and marks the check Hypothesis.
    What is answer-first writing?
    Opening a page or section with a direct answer to its question in the first sentence or two, then the detail. It is standard journalism practice and helps readers. Whether it raises AI citation rates has not been tested in a controlled way, so the checker treats it as a hypothesis.
    Can a page block AI Overviews from quoting it?
    Google documents that preview controls such as nosnippet, data-nosnippet and max-snippet limit what is shown from a page in Search, and points to them when content appears in AI features. If you paste HTML, the checker flags these controls.
    Is the content I paste stored or sent anywhere?
    No. The analysis runs in your browser. Nothing you paste leaves the page.
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