CiteSiteFree tool
AI citation readiness checker
Seven signals that decide whether a page can be quoted and attributed: whether any passage survives being lifted out, and whether a machine can say who wrote it and when.
Check the page you most want quoted. Citability is a property of one page and the markup around it, not of a domain.
A citation is two things, not one
The engine has to find a passage that states something complete on its own, and it has to be able to say where the passage came from. Pages fail on one or the other, and the fixes have nothing to do with each other: the first is a writing problem and the second is a markup problem.
That is why this reports signal by signal rather than as a score. An average would hide exactly the distinction that decides what you do next.
The self-containment test, and its limits
A quote is one passage, alone, on someone else’s screen. This tool counts paragraphs that would still mean something there: roughly 25 to 110 words, not opening with a pronoun or a connective, and containing something specific rather than pure abstraction.
It is a shallow test and worth being honest about. It reads the first word of a paragraph, so it cannot see a pronoun in the second sentence, and it has no opinion at all about whether the claim is true or interesting. The count it produces is a floor — the number of paragraphs that are structurally quotable, not the number that deserve to be.
Nothing here judges the writing
This is the uncomfortable part, and it is a fact about engines rather than about prose. A clearly structured page making a weak argument is more quotable than a brilliant one written as a single unbroken essay. The essay is better. It is also harder to lift one paragraph out of, so it gets summarised, and a summary carries no link.
The recommendation is not to write worse. It is to break what you have written under subheadings, open paragraphs with their subject, and put anything enumerable in a list.
The finding that outranks the rest
If the tool reports a few dozen words on a page you know runs to two thousand, stop reading the other signals. The body is being assembled in the browser, and the engines see what this saw. No amount of structure or markup helps a page whose text does not arrive in the response.
The same applies upstream: check that your robots.txt lets the answer engines in before spending time on any of this, and check that your page declares who you are — attribution needs something to attribute to.
Questions
- Does this tell me whether AI actually cites my page?
- No, and nothing that reads only your page can. This checks whether the page is built so a citation is possible — whether there are passages that survive being lifted, and whether a machine can say who wrote them and when. Whether an engine chooses to use one is a question about the engine, and the only honest way to answer it is to ask.
- What makes a paragraph quotable?
- That it means the same thing alone on a stranger's screen as it does on your page. A paragraph opening “This means that…” refers to something the reader cannot see, so an engine paraphrases it instead of quoting it — and a paraphrase carries no link back to you. Length matters too: under about 25 words says too little to be worth carrying, over about 110 gets truncated.
- Why does the date matter?
- Because an assistant weighing whether to rely on a claim wants to know how old it is, and an undated page is not evidence about now. dateModified matters as much as datePublished: without it, a page you revised last week reads as untouched since the day it went up.
- Is linking out really a citation signal?
- A page that cites nothing asks to be taken on faith, which is the position an engine is least willing to grant a source it does not recognise. Citing others is also how a page joins a topic rather than sitting outside it. This is the weakest signal on the list and it is not a ranking trick — it is what makes a claim checkable.
- It says only 40 words of body text. My page is much longer.
- Then the rest of it is assembled in the browser. Everything here is read from the HTML as it arrives, which is also how most crawlers read it — so what this tool saw is roughly what they see. That single finding matters more than everything else on the list.
Related
AI search optimization: the work, in order — the editorial and technical work behind these signals, and what to do first.
Being quotable is the precondition. Whether you are actually quoted is what CiteSite measures — by asking ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity the questions your customers ask and recording what comes back.