CitableEVIDENCE BEFORE PROMISES · RUBRIC 2.0.0
How Citable measures a page
A repeatable technical checklist for one public page and its discovery files. A 100/100 score is checklist compliance; it is not a citation probability, a ranking guarantee or a rating of an entire company.
Eight checks, 100 possible points
- Search-tool robots permissions: 30. Rules are evaluated for the requested path; training permissions are shown separately.
- Initial HTML text: 15. Text observed without executing JavaScript. Short text alone does not prove a rendering problem.
- Title and meta description: 15. Presence and basic content checks, not an editorial quality judgment.
- JSON-LD: 15. Parseable JSON and basic context/type markers, not complete schema or rich-result validation.
- Sitemap: 10. Bounded checks on the discovered XML, not a crawl of every listed page.
- Heading outline: 5. A basic structural signal, not a citation requirement.
- Canonical and sharing tags: 5. URL identity and sharing signals.
- Optional llms.txt: 5. An emerging convention, not a requirement for Google AI search.
Unknown means unmeasured
A timeout, protected resource or network failure is not evidence that a feature is missing. Unmeasured checks remain unknown; incomplete audits show coverage and a possible score range instead of an unjustified precise grade.
Safe, limited public inspection
Citable validates public network destinations and redirects, applies request and response limits, respects its own robots rules and does not bypass access controls. Cross-origin redirects are blocked; use the final address. It does not log in to scanned websites or run their JavaScript.
What the audit cannot tell you
It cannot prove search-engine indexing, visits from AI answers, actual citations, conversions or provider-network access. Visits require analytics. Search visibility requires search-engine reporting. Reports capture the scan time; a changed website requires a new audit.
Examples and practical next steps
A brand can score 80 because one page lacks specific checklist signals. That does not imply the brand is unsuccessful. Start with the measured evidence, make an appropriate fix, and compare a fresh scan. Do not invent facts or remove private-path restrictions to chase points.
Sources and further validation
- Google: AI features and your website — no special AI markup guarantees inclusion.
- Google: robots.txt introduction
- Google: structured data introduction
- Google: sitemap overview