Citability
Citability is how readily a passage of text can be lifted out of a page and used verbatim in an AI answer. A citable passage answers one question completely in two to four sentences and makes sense with no surrounding context.
Language models retrieve and quote chunks, not documents. Citability is a property of the chunk.
illustrative
Lifted out of the page, this survives
The Haruwell Daily Fluid is ratedSPF 50+, tested at the full2 mg/cm² application rate to the2019 edition of ISO 24444.
This does not
As mentioned above, it performs well against the standard discussed, and this is what makes it such a strong choice for the shopper described.
- Names the brandno unresolved “we” or “the company”
- Carries a numbera value that can be checked
- Carries a dateso staleness is visible
- Stands aloneno “as mentioned above”
Extracted, a dependent passage reads as a fragment — so it does not get extracted.
This is the failure mode translated marketing copy runs into. Translation preserves grammar while smoothing out exactly the specific, claim-bearing sentences a model would want to quote.
Related: answer engine optimization.