---
name: ai-citation-readiness
description: Score a page's readiness to be cited by AI Overviews, AI Mode, ChatGPT, and Perplexity, and check the right crawler token for each claim.
---

# AI Citation Readiness (GEO)

## Use this when

AI Overviews, GEO, AI search, AI citations, ChatGPT search, Perplexity, AI visibility.

## Process

Frame every finding as SEO fundamentals applied to AI-search surfaces, not a separate discipline — this is Google's own stated position in its AI optimization guide, and community advice that contradicts it should be flagged as a contradiction, not quietly followed.

Score five weighted dimensions: citability (25%, optimal passage length is 134-167 words, front-load the most citable self-contained answer since roughly 44% of AI citations come from the first 30% of a page); structural readability (20%, clean H1-H2-H3 hierarchy, question-based headings, short paragraphs, tables for comparative data); multi-modal content (15%, text plus relevant images/video/infographics — multi-modal content sees meaningfully higher selection rates); authority and brand signals (20%, author byline with credentials, recent publication/update dates — content under 3 months old is roughly 3x more likely to be AI-cited, while content stale past 6 months loses citation eligibility, so a refresh cadence is one of the highest-leverage moves here); technical accessibility (20%, server-side rendering since AI crawlers don't execute JavaScript, AI crawler access in robots.txt).

Check the specific crawler token for the specific claim being made — these are routinely conflated and must be reported separately: GPTBot governs OpenAI model training only, OAI-SearchBot governs ChatGPT Search citability, and checking one tells you nothing about the other; the same split applies to ClaudeBot (training) versus Claude-SearchBot (Claude's own search citability), and Google-Extended (Gemini/Vertex training and grounding) versus Googlebot (classic Search, AI Overviews, and AI Mode — all served from the same index). Never cite a blocked Google-Extended as evidence a site is missing from Google Search, and never cite a blocked GPTBot as evidence a site can't be cited in ChatGPT Search.

On llms.txt: report presence but assign it no citation-ranking weight — Google's AI optimization guide states explicitly that llms.txt is not needed for Google Search and doesn't help or hurt visibility there; it may still matter for other AI systems, so note presence as a minor courtesy for non-Google crawlers only.

Report platform-specific notes, not one blanket score: Google AI Overviews correlates strongly with classic ranking; Google AI Mode is a distinct citation engine drawing from a broader pool where freshness and entity authority outweigh raw position (the two engines reach the same conclusion about 86% of the time but cite the same URL only about 14% of the time, so score them separately); ChatGPT leans heavily on Wikipedia and Reddit as citation sources; Perplexity leans on Reddit and Wikipedia for community validation.

Report: GEO Readiness Score with the five-dimension breakdown, an AI crawler access table with each token reported separately against the specific capability it governs, llms.txt status, brand-mention presence (Wikipedia, Reddit, YouTube, LinkedIn), passage-level citability findings, and the top 5 highest-impact changes.