Citability, not just crawlability · free · no email

AI content audit

An AI content audit tests whether your content is worth quoting, not just technically crawlable. Google's advice for AI features is plain: "You can apply the same foundational SEO best practices for AI features as you do for Google Search overall." In practice that means a direct answer near the top, specific sourced facts, and headings that carve the page into liftable passages. We grade those signals across up to 150 pages, free.

Getting your site indexed is the first problem. Getting it cited is the second one, and it requires a different kind of audit. AI answer engines quote content that is specific, extractable and structured. They pass over content that is vague, unbroken or buried behind JavaScript.

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

What it means

What makes content citable by an AI engine.

When a user asks ChatGPT, Claude or Perplexity a question, the engine retrieves a set of candidate pages and extracts passages from them. The pages that get cited tend to share a small set of characteristics:

  • They state the answer directly, near the top, in plain language.
  • They contain specific claims: numbers, named entities, defined terms, concrete steps, rather than general descriptions.
  • Their headings break the page into identifiable, named sections so the engine can locate the relevant passage quickly.
  • Their structured data tells the engine what type of content it is (article, FAQ, how-to, organization).
  • Their content has not gone stale; engines prefer recent, accurate information.

A standard SEO audit checks technical health and keyword presence. An AI content audit checks citability: whether the content itself is structured in a way that makes it worth quoting. Background reading: What is AEO? and fixing AI crawler access.

What we check

The content checks in an AI content audit.

  • Answer block: whether your page opens with a direct, extractable answer to the topic it covers. Content that opens with a preamble or a brand statement is harder for AI engines to use as a citation source.
  • Citable facts: specific quotable material in your body copy: statistics with sources, named claims, defined terms, how-to steps with concrete detail. We grade both the presence and the specificity of claims found.
  • Passage structure: your heading distribution. A page with one heading and 2,000 words of body text is hard for a passage-level retrieval system to navigate. Descriptive subheadings every 200-400 words are easy to slice. See fixing heading structure.
  • Question headers: whether subheadings frame content as answers to the questions people actually ask.
  • Schema completeness: FAQPage markup makes Q&A content directly extractable; Article and HowTo classify content type; Organization grounds entity identification.
  • One H1: exactly one main heading, clearly stating the topic. Multiple H1s or a missing H1 reduce the engine's confidence in what the page is about.
  • JavaScript render: even perfectly structured content is uncitable if it only exists after scripts run.
  • llms.txt: pointing non-Google AI crawlers at your best content pages. Guide: llms.txt explained.

The free scan gives you a citability verdict with plain-language diagnosis, a specific-claim density grade, a heading structure grade, a structured data coverage summary and the JavaScript render check, across your whole site, up to 150 pages. The $10 Full Report adds the PDF, prioritized action plan and AI-ready fix file. Siblings: AI citation checker and the AI search optimization hub.

Questions

Straight answers.

My content ranks on Google. Why isn't it citable by AI engines?

Google ranking and AI citability use overlapping but distinct signals. Google rewards keyword relevance, authority signals and technical health. AI engines additionally reward specific extractable claims, clear passage structure and schema classification. A page can rank well while being passed over as a citation source because it is too vague, too unstructured, or behind a JavaScript render wall. The audit diagnoses the specific gap.

What is "passage structure" and why does it matter?

Google introduced passage-level indexing to surface relevant excerpts from long pages. AI engines do something similar: they extract the most relevant passage rather than citing the whole page. Clear, descriptive headings every few hundred words give engines natural cut points. A page with no subheadings is harder to use as a citation source even if the content quality is good.

Does AuditLamp rewrite my content?

The scan diagnoses. It tells you which paragraphs lack specific claims, which headings are too generic, and which sections are missing schema. The $10 Full Report packages every finding into a prioritized action plan and an AI-ready fix file your own tools can run with. Nothing writes to your site automatically.

How is this different from a standard SEO content audit?

A standard content audit checks word count, keyword density, readability scores and duplicate content. Those are not useless, but they do not address AI citability. We additionally check whether the answer appears near the top, whether specific claims are present, whether structured data classifies the content type, and whether a JavaScript render wall hides the content from crawlers.

Find out if your content is worth quoting.

Free scan of your whole site, up to 150 pages. Every content finding grounded in documented engine behavior, in plain language.

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