Citability, audited · free scan · no email

AI citation checker

Getting cited by an AI engine is not luck; it is a set of auditable preconditions. The GEO study (Aggarwal et al.) measured it: "Through rigorous evaluation, we demonstrate that GEO can boost visibility by up to 40% in generative engine responses." The lift came from sourced statistics, quotations and clear structure, exactly the signals we test. Our 164-check audit tells you whether your site meets the conditions today.

Crawlers let in. Content self-contained enough to lift. Facts sourced. Identity clear. Any one of those missing and you do not get cited; you do not even get considered.

Free Visibility Scan: whole site, up to 150 pages, no email. Full Report is a one-time $10.

What citable actually means

Before you can show up in AI answers, four things happened upstream.

When ChatGPT, Claude or Perplexity pulls a passage from your site into an answer, something specific happened first: their crawler reached you, parsed your content without JavaScript, found a clean answer near the top of the page, and had enough context to attribute it to a named, trusted source. Any one of those steps missing and you are not in the running.

Most owners discover they are not being cited and assume the problem is "not enough content." Usually it is not. It is a robots.txt entry that quietly blocks GPTBot, or body copy that only exists after a JavaScript render, or a page that never states the answer outright in the first paragraph. Those are fixable in a day. Why you're not cited by ChatGPT covers the common patterns.

Being citable is the precondition. Reachable, readable, quote-worthy. That is what this audit checks.

What we actually test

The checks that determine citability.

  • AI crawler access: whether GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot and Google-Extended are allowed or blocked in your robots.txt, checked bot by bot. See fixing AI crawler access.
  • JavaScript-free content: whether your page's core content is present in the raw HTML, because most AI crawlers do not execute scripts.
  • Answer block quality: whether your page opens with a direct, quotable answer to the question it targets, scored on presence, specificity, quoted evidence and outbound sources.
  • Citable sourced facts: whether body copy contains concrete statistics and whether those statistics cite a source, the pattern the GEO study found most effective.
  • Passage structure: whether long content is broken into headings so each passage can stand alone and be lifted independently.
  • Entity clarity: whether engines can tell who is publishing this content, consistently, across structured data and about pages. See fixing entity clarity.
  • llms.txt presence: whether you have given AI engines an explicit map of your content.
  • Schema coverage: whether Article, Organization and FAQPage markup is present and valid where relevant.

Your scan comes back with your citability signals graded alongside your overall score, every failure worst first, in plain English, with the source it stands on. Siblings: the AI visibility checker and your AI readiness score; the umbrella is the AI search optimization hub.

Questions

Straight answers.

Do you show me what ChatGPT says about my brand?

No. AI answers vary by prompt, session and user, and live answer monitoring is on our roadmap but not yet built. What we audit today is the measurable half you can act on: the crawler access, content structure and identity signals that determine whether AI engines can cite you at all. Fix them and you have done everything within your control.

What is the difference between being indexed and being citable?

Google indexing and AI citability overlap but are not the same problem. A page can rank on Google and still fail to be cited by AI engines because different crawlers, different content requirements and different quality signals apply. Our scan grades both separately.

My content is detailed and long. Why am I still not being cited?

Length is not the primary signal. AI engines prefer short, direct, self-contained answers with specific facts near the top of the page. A dense 3,000-word page with no clear opening answer is harder to cite than a focused 600-word page that opens with the answer and backs it with a source. See how to get cited by Claude and how to get cited by Perplexity.

Do I need llms.txt to be citable?

No. llms.txt is a helpful signal and we check for it, but the bigger blockers are nearly always crawler access and content structure. Fix those first.

Is the scan really free?

Yes. Your whole site, up to 150 pages, every failing check named worst first, no email required. The diagnosis is free; the $10 Full Report unseals the page-by-page detail with the PDF, action plan and fix file.

Find out if you meet the conditions to be cited.

Free scan of your whole site, up to 150 pages. No email. Worst problem first.

164 graded checks · citation preconditions, not guesses · the audit that shows its work