AI Web MakerMethod · updated 16 October 2026
How the AI Citation Score works
The AI Citation Score is a rating from 0 to 100 of how likely an AI search engine is to quote a page, built from five areas: can AI reach it (25 points), is there an answer to lift (30), evidence (20), entity and trust (15) and says something specific (10). Every point a page loses is shown with its fix.
The AI Search Visibility Checker reads each page as it arrives, without running JavaScript, the way most AI bots read it. Two of the checks are made by an AI model (Claude Haiku): the question a page is best placed to answer with how directly it answers it, and how specific its words are. The passage it picks as the one an engine would quote is kept only if those exact words are on the page. Every other check is counted from the page itself.
Can AI reach it? (25)
| Check | Points | How it is counted |
|---|---|---|
| AI search bots let in | 12 | Each of the five engines counts equally: let in by robots.txt and not refused by a firewall (full), not confirmed (60%), quoting limited by nosnippet (50%), shut out (0). |
| Indexable and quotable | 5 | No noindex (meta robots or X-Robots-Tag). nosnippet or max-snippet:0 keeps 2 of the 5 points. |
| Words without JavaScript | 4 | 150 words or more in the page as it arrives (4), 60 to 149 (2). A page drawn by scripts scores 0. |
| Canonical | 2 | Empty, or pointing to the page itself. |
| In the sitemap | 2 | Listed in the XML sitemap (the homepage always counts). |
Is there an answer to lift? (30)
| Check | Points | How it is counted |
|---|---|---|
| Answers its question | 10 | The AI names the question the page is best placed to answer and rates how directly it answers: in the opening lines (10), clearly but lower (8), vaguely (4), not at all (0). |
| Opening answer | 6 | The first paragraph before the first section: 40 to 60 words (6), 30 to 80 (4), 20 to 120 (2). |
| Question headings | 5 | Share of section headings phrased as questions: 60% or more (5), 30% (3), any (1). |
| Sections open with an answer | 4 | Share of sections whose first sentence is 30 words or fewer. |
| Questions and answers | 3 | 4 or more (3), 2 or 3 (2), from FAQPage data, question headings under an FAQ heading, or questions that open and close. |
| Lists and tables | 2 | One point each. |
Evidence (20)
| Check | Points | How it is counted |
|---|---|---|
| Facts with numbers | 5 or 7 | Figures per 300 words: 3 or more (full), 1.5 (60%), 0.5 (25%). Years alone are not counted. |
| Primary sources | 6 or 2 | Links to government, standards, research or official documentation: 2 or more (full), 1 (half). |
| Updated date | 4 or 3 | A visible date and a date in the page data (full), one of them (75%). |
| Author | 3 | A named author or byline; on a business page, the business data counts. |
| Own data | 2 or 5 | Something the business found or measured itself ("we tested", "of the 120 kitchens we fitted"). |
Where two numbers are given, the first is for articles and guides, the second for business pages (home, service, product, about), which are judged more on their own facts than on citing research.
Entity and trust (15)
| Check | Points | How it is counted |
|---|---|---|
| Business data | 4 | Organization or LocalBusiness data on the homepage. |
| sameAs | 2 | Two or more links to the business's profiles elsewhere (one: 1). |
| About page | 2 | Linked from the site. |
| Contact page | 2 | Linked from the site. |
| Address or phone | 2 | In the business data or as a phone link. |
| Page data | 2 | Article, Service, Product, FAQPage, BreadcrumbList or another type describing the page. |
| https | 1 | A secure address with a valid certificate. |
Says something specific (10)
| Check | Points | How it is counted |
|---|---|---|
| Specific, not generic | 8 | The AI rates the page: facts only this business could give (8), concrete details (6), a few details (3), generic (0). |
| Not repeated | 2 | No other scanned page with nearly the same text (simhash distance 6 or less). |
What holds a page's score down?
Three problems cap a page whatever its other strengths.
- A page every AI search bot is shut out of scores 10 at most.
- A page marked noindex scores 15 at most.
- A page with fewer than 80 words scores 30 at most.
How is the website's AI Visibility Score worked out?
It is 55% its pages, 20% how many AI search bots it lets in and 25% how often other websites name it.
The pages part is the average of the pages read, with the homepage counted twice. The access part gives 85 points for the five engines (each counted as above), 10 for a sitemap and 5 for a robots.txt file. The off site part comes from one web search for the site's address and its name: other websites naming the address count fully, the name alone counts half and only when it is two words or more, and a mention on a community site, a reference site or a review site adds 10 points each. When the search cannot run, the score is the pages and access parts alone, re-weighted.
What are the limits?
The score predicts how quotable a page is; it does not record whether engines quote it today.
AI engines also weigh signals no single website shows, and they change how they choose sources. A firewall may refuse a request made as Googlebot or Bingbot from our servers and still let the real crawlers in, so those two are marked "could not confirm" rather than counted against the site. llms.txt is reported but not scored, because no AI search engine has said it uses it. Structured data carries few points, because adding it alone has not been shown to raise how often a page is quoted. The weights will be checked against real citations, measured by asking the engines questions, and this page will say when they change.