Is your page ready to be cited by AI?

What “AI readiness” actually means

When someone asks ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini or Google’s AI Overviews a question, the engine doesn’t hand back ten blue links. It writes one answer and cites a short list of sources. AI readiness is simply how easy your page makes it for those engines to understand, trust and quote you. A page can rank perfectly well in classic search and still be invisible to AI, because the two reward slightly different things.

Answer engines favour pages that lead with a clean, self-contained answer, mark up their content so a machine can parse it, demonstrate genuine expertise and freshness, and sit inside a web of related pages. This grader scores your page against those signals and hands you a prioritised fix list, so you can stop guessing why a competitor gets cited and you don’t.

How the grader works

Paste a URL and the tool fetches that single page and reads its HTML, exactly the way a crawler would. It then runs thirteen checks grouped into three lenses, weights them, and returns a 0-100 score with a letter grade. Every check comes back as pass, partial or fail, with a plain-English explanation of what it found and the exact change to make. There is no account to create and the page is never stored. It is the same analysis CiteTrack AI runs continuously inside WordPress, distilled into a one-shot public tool.

The three lenses

The score blends three ways of looking at a page, because being cited by AI needs all three working together:

• AEO (Answer Engine Optimization), can an engine lift a clean answer from your page? This covers your opening answer capsule, FAQ schema, question-shaped headings and scannable structure like lists and tables.
• GEO (Generative Engine Optimization), does the engine trust the page enough to cite it? This is your entity and content schema, depth of coverage, freshness signals and internal links.
• SEO foundations, can the page be found and indexed at all? AI Overviews and search-grounded answers draw from the index, so indexability, a single clear H1, a good meta description, title length and image alt text still matter.

What each check looks for

Here is exactly what the grader measures and why each one moves whether AI cites you:

Answer-first opening

Engines prefer to lift a complete, standalone answer. If your opening paragraph rambles for 200 words before getting to the point, there is nothing clean to quote. The grader checks that the first substantive paragraph is a tight 40-80 words that answers the page’s core question on its own.

FAQ schema and question headings

The questions people type into AI are often the same ones in “People Also Ask.” Marking up an FAQ with FAQPage structured data, and phrasing your H2s and H3s as real questions, gives an engine an obvious question-answer pair to match against and quote.

Scannable structure

Lists and comparison tables get extracted into answers far more often than unbroken prose, because they are already shaped like the bullet points and tables an AI wants to output. At least one is a baseline; the right number depends on the topic.

Entity and content schema

Organization, Article and Product markup tell an engine who you are and what kind of content this is, so it can resolve you as a trusted entity rather than an anonymous page. This is one of the strongest trust signals in generative search.

Depth, freshness and internal links

Thin pages rarely get cited. Coverage that answers the question and its obvious follow-ups, a visible and marked-up recent date, and links to your related pages all tell an engine the page is current, complete and part of a credible site.

SEO foundations

Finally the hygiene that gates everything else: the page must not be set to noindex, should have exactly one descriptive H1, a 120-160 character meta description, a title under about 60 characters, and alt text on its images. Get these wrong and the best answer content in the world can still be skipped.

From score to fixed: how CiteTrack AI helps

The grader analyzes one page. CiteTrack AI runs comparable checks across your WordPress content, separates confirmed failures from optional observations, and creates work only for supported gaps. Optional answer aids require corroborating Search Console evidence before they become review tasks. It then re-runs the buyer questions you approve so you can observe whether citation status changes; a crawler visit or an edit alone never proves indexing, causation or a need to rewrite. Start with AEO & GEO optimization, or see how to audit a site’s AI visibility end to end.

Frequently asked questions