What makes a page citable

Spencer Thursfield · Published 2026-08 · Evidence: platform documentation + emerging research

A citable page is one an AI system can safely lean on: it can be fetched, it says something checkable, and quoting it will not embarrass the machine. Eight tests, in the order they fail.

1. Retrieval. The system's crawler can fetch the page. Required
2. Eligibility. The page is indexed and permitted to appear with a snippet. Google requires ordinary snippet eligibility before a page can support its AI answers. Required
3. Alignment. It answers the question asked, including the sub-questions systems generate. Official recommendation
4. Distinctiveness. It contains something a thousand generic pages cannot replace. Official recommendation
5. Evidence. Facts, experience or references that substantiate an answer. Adjectives substantiate nothing. Strongly supported
6. Extractability. A system can isolate the claim, definition, comparison or procedure without misreading it. Explicit statements, precise units, dates. Emerging
7. Credibility. The source is trustworthy enough for the consequence of the claim. A pottery tip and a medical claim carry different bars. Strongly supported
8. Utility. Citing you gives the reader something beyond the generated summary: a tool, evidence, a way to buy or book. A page that merely restates a complete answer gives the system little reason to send anyone to it. Emerging

Note what the list omits: word counts, keyword densities, schema tricks, llms.txt. The tests concern substance and legibility, because that is all the public evidence supports. Whether specific features such as tables, definitions and named authors move real citation rates is the question our study measures against its comparison group.