Citability

What makes a passage liftable

It answers the question in one place. A buyer asks how much a service costs; the citable page has a sentence with the price range in it, not a paragraph about quality followed by a contact form. It is specific: a number, a name, a date, a condition. It is attributable: the page says which business is speaking and that business is the same one named in the site’s schema, address and phone number. And it is reachable, which means the crawler received the page and not a bot-protection challenge.

This is not a matter of writing more. Across 9,483 small-business sites audited in September 2026 the median homepage ran 880 words and only 3.9% were under 150. Yet 61.5% had no question-and-answer content, and 50.7% had a question in a heading with no answer isolated beneath it. The words were there; the liftable span was not. The audit is written up in what 9,483 small business websites serve to an AI crawler.

Citability and authority

Authority is who links to you; citability is what an assistant can take from you. Aggarwal et al., “GEO: Generative Engine Optimization” (KDD 2024) found that source-side changes alone, adding statistics, quotations and citations to the page, measurably changed how visible that source was in generated answers, with the rest of the web held constant. Authority still matters for being fetched in the first place. Citability decides what happens after.