Citation readiness
Fifteen checks on one page, scored out of 100. Open a practice-area page from your own site, read it beside this list, and tick what you find. Written by Joe Ashta, a GEO / AEO consultant for law firms, from the properties that separate a page an AI system quotes from a page it passes over.
This check covers one page at a time. It asks whether the page answers something, whether a reader can tell who wrote it and for which firm, and whether the answer can be lifted and attributed. Run it on one page, then on the next.
What this checks
A page earns a source link by being useful to an answer somebody else is writing. Three things make it useful. It has to be about one question, so a system looking for that question finds an exact fit. It has to carry an author, a firm and a place, so a passage can be attributed. It has to be current, and written in sentences short enough to lift whole. AI citations sets out what a source link proves and what it leaves open. Grounding is the step the page has to clear before any of this matters.
These are all page properties, which is why a firm can fix them without anyone's permission, and why the result is limited. A page can be cited while the firm goes unnamed, because a citation follows from a page and a mention follows from what a system believes about the firm.
0 / 100
Tick the items you can verify. The score and the list of remaining work update as you go.
Specific
Attributable
Current and quotable
What to do next
How to read the score
Each tick is worth about seven points, and the last one carries the remainder so a full page reaches 100. Up to 42 the page has little to quote and less to attribute, and the fastest gain is in the first group. From 49 to 70 the page is quotable in places and thinly attributed, so a passage taken from it arrives without a name. From 77 to 98 the page is well formed, and the open items are usually dates and source links. At 100 nothing on the page remains to change, and the question moves to how often it is used.
What to do with the result
Fix the specific group first. A page that answers one question in its opening lines benefits from every later item, and one that answers nothing gains little from a byline. Attribution comes second, because it is quick, and it turns a quoted passage into a named firm. Dates and source links come last and need revisiting each year.
Page work has a ceiling. Once the pages are in order, naming depends on records the firm does not write, the subject of the AI visibility checklist and of the entity record published on this site. A recommendation, the outcome a firm is paid for, sits at the far end of that longer job.