Free tool
Citability Checker
Enter the address of a page and see how easily an AI answer could quote it: whether it opens with the answer, uses question-shaped headings, keeps passages short and self-contained, and backs its claims with sources and dates.
Check crawler access first with the AI Crawler Checker: a perfectly written page can’t be cited if the bots can’t reach it.
How it works
The tool fetches the page once, reads the HTML as served (no JavaScript), and keeps the main content. It then runs 14 checks: whether the page loads and is indexable, how much text there is, the main heading, the length of the opening passage, question-shaped subheadings, paragraph length, paragraphs that open with words like “this” or “it”, lists and tables, numbers and dates, links to other sites, a machine-readable date, a named author, JSON-LD and the title and description.
Each check passes (2 points), needs improving (1) or needs fixing (0), and the score is the share of points out of 100. The thresholds, such as an opening passage under about 60 words, are rules of thumb from the course, not published limits.
Lesson 3, The Answer Quarter, covers answer-first writing, question headings and passage-level clarity in depth.
Related reading
Questions
What does citability mean?
How easily a passage from your page can be lifted into an AI answer and still make sense: it answers a question directly, names its subject, gives specifics and shows where its facts come from.
Is the score what ChatGPT or Google uses?
No. No AI company publishes a citability score. The checks are this course's checklist for writing passages that can be quoted, so treat the score as a to-do list, not a ranking.
Why does it say my page has almost no text?
The checker reads the HTML your server sends, without running JavaScript. If your content only appears after scripts run, crawlers that read raw HTML may see the same near-empty page.
Which part of the page does it read?
The main content: the <main> or <article> element if the page has one, otherwise the body, with navigation, headers, footers and forms left out.
Is the page I check stored?
No. The page is fetched once to build the report, and neither the page nor the address is kept.
Learn what to do with the results
Lesson 1, “How answer engines choose sources”, is free. See how AI answers get built, and why they are not ten blue links.
Start lesson 1 free