Foundations
Citation Readiness
How ready a page is to be quoted and attributed inside an AI answer.
Citation readiness is a page's overall fitness to be quoted and attributed by an AI answer. It rolls up several things: extractable passages, high fact density, clean structure and schema, a resolvable entity behind the page, and corroboration from third-party sources. A page can rank well and still be citation-unready if its claims are vague or its passages do not stand alone.
Thinking in terms of readiness keeps the focus on the whole chain, not one tactic. Schema without quotable sentences does little; quotable sentences on a page the model cannot attribute to a trusted entity do little. Readiness is high when all the links hold: the engine can find the page, lift a clean passage, and confidently say who it came from.
Auditing citation readiness page by page is the practical core of an AEO engagement — it turns 'be more visible in AI' into a concrete checklist per URL.
Related terms
Extractability
Whether a passage can be lifted into an AI answer and still stand on its own.
Fact Density
How many specific, sourced facts a passage packs per sentence.
Quotable Sentence
A self-contained statement an AI can lift verbatim into an answer and attribute.
Entity Home
The single web page an engine treats as the authoritative source of an entity's identity.
Machine-Readable Content
Content encoded so software can parse its meaning, not just display its text.
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