Citability Checker
Citability is whether an answer engine can quote your page — and engines quote passages, not pages. This checker reads a page the way a retrieval system does, cuts it at the headings, and names the exact sentences that would fall apart once separated from everything around them.
The citability check calls no model and guesses nothing: it is deterministic, so it is free, instant, and gives the same answer twice. That is the half of AI visibility you control directly — see chunking and passage retrieval for why it works this way.
What it looks for
- Passages that open with a pronoun. “This is why…” means nothing once the paragraph above is removed, and removed is how the machine reads it.
- Claims attributed to “we”. An engine cannot attribute a claim whose subject it cannot resolve. Your brand name makes the same sentence quotable.
- Numbers with no unit or date. A figure that cannot be stated safely is a figure taken from somebody else.
- Vague time words. “Recently” carries no freshness, and freshness breaks ties between two otherwise adequate passages.
- Answers buried below the fold, headings that are puns rather than questions, sections too long to chunk cleanly, and missing dates or structured data.
Frequently asked questions
▸ ▾ Why does this not use AI?
Because it does not need to. Whether a passage can be quoted is a mechanical property of the prose: does it stand on its own, do its numbers carry units, can its claims be attributed. Measuring that directly makes the answer free, instant and identical on a second run — none of which is true of asking a model.
▸ ▾ How is this different from the AI Visibility Checker?
They answer different questions. This one asks whether your page is quotable and names the sentences that are not. The AI Visibility Checker asks the engines what they actually say about your brand, which needs repeated sampling because the answers vary. Fix structure here, then measure the effect there.
▸ ▾ Will a perfect score get me cited?
No, and any tool promising that is selling you something. This measures structure, not authority or truth. A well-shaped page making weak claims scores well here and still will not be quoted. Structure is the half you control directly.
▸ ▾ Why does it flag sentences that start with “This” or “It”?
Because retrieval takes a passage, not a page. A paragraph beginning “This is why it matters” is meaningless once the paragraph above it is gone — and gone is exactly how the machine sees it. Naming the subject costs three words and is the single highest-value fix on most pages.
▸ ▾ Why is “we” a problem?
An engine attributes a claim to a source. “We are the fastest” has a subject the engine cannot resolve once the sentence leaves your page, so it is unusable as a quote. The same sentence with your brand name in it is quotable.
▸ ▾ Does it run JavaScript?
No — deliberately. Several retrievers read raw HTML and execute nothing. A page whose content only appears after hydration scores badly here for exactly the reason it is not quoted there.
Structure is one half. To find out what the engines actually say about you, run the AI Visibility Checker.