The specimen for this post is the AI citations service page on this site, taken apart into the 5 parts an assistant can lift and the 2 parts that are missing. We use our own page because we can show it. Client pages are under NDA, and a specimen you can’t open proves nothing.
An assistant reads your page the way a hurried buyer does: one paragraph at a time, and it throws the rest away. Each of the 5 tests below asks whether a part of the page still works on its own.
The answer paragraph carries the whole offer
Under the H1, before the one-sentence lede, the page carries one boxed paragraph written to be quoted alone. It reads: “An article for AI citations from us is a 1,200–1,800-word B2B article on a question your buyers put to ChatGPT or Perplexity, with the answer in the first paragraph, a source at every claim, FAQ markup, a visible author and date, and a record of what the assistants answer at delivery and 30 days later”. Then: “It costs $149, or $549 for four”.
That is 2 sentences and 6 facts: length, subject, structure, 2 checks, price. Cut the rest of the page away and a buyer still knows what’s sold and what it costs.
The test: paste the paragraph into an email with no subject line and send it to a colleague. If they can say what the page offers, it passes.
A claim and its source share a sentence
Assistants pull short pieces. Microsoft’s guidance for Bing and Copilot, published in October 2025, says assistants “break content into smaller, usable pieces”. It adds: “These modular pieces are what get ranked and assembled into answers”.
If your claim is in the second paragraph and the source is in a list at the bottom, the piece that gets lifted has no source in it. On the specimen page, the promise is stated as a rule of the product: “Every claim with its source in the same sentence, not in a list at the end”. This post follows it. Each quotation carries its link where the words are.
The test is the same email. Send a colleague one paragraph with a number in it and ask where the number came from. If they have to ask you, the paragraph fails.
The date and the author are on the page
A buyer told by OpenAI’s help page to “review when it was published or updated” looks for a date on the page they landed on. Our blog posts carry one above the title, next to the byline, and an updated date when there is one.
The service page carries both under the lede. A byline, a published date, an updated date. We’d flag either one missing on your page in the first 5 minutes.
The questions block is plain text
Bing’s guidance is direct about question-and-answer pairs. It says they mirror the way people search, and that assistants can lift them into an answer word for word. The same document warns against hiding answers in tabs and expandable menus.
The specimen has 4 questions at the bottom, each with a 2-to-3-sentence answer, all visible without a click. The second is the question every buyer asks, whether we promise the assistants will cite them. The answer starts with “No” and then says what is controlled instead. A question block that only holds the easy questions is a block nobody quotes.
The price is a number, stated 4 times
Assistants can’t quote “contact us for pricing”, and neither can your buyer. The page says $149 in the line above the headline, in the answer paragraph, in the price card and in the closing line, with $549 for 4 next to it every time. The rates page repeats the same 2 numbers, so a lifted sentence and the page it points to agree.
When a price can’t be published, the basis can. Our press releases are quoted, and the service page says on what: “quoted per project, depending on whether the quotes need interviews or partner sign-off”. That sentence can be lifted. “Pricing depends on your needs” can’t.
What we’d cut
Google’s guide to generative AI search, updated in July 2026, says there is “no requirement to break your content into tiny pieces for AI to better understand it”. It also says: “You don’t need to write in a specific way just for generative AI search”. The 5 parts above are what a buyer with 2 minutes needs, and the assistant reads the same way.
What we do cut is the opposite of the 5 parts: the paragraph about your industry before the offer, the claim whose source is on another screen, the accordion. The PDF that holds the specification goes too. Bing’s document names it as a mistake: “Avoid relying on PDFs for core information”. So does the page that says “competitive pricing” and nothing more.
Run the 5 tests on your own page
Open the page that should carry the citation and read only its opening paragraph. Find the source of the first number. Find the date and the author. Open the questions without clicking. Find the price or its basis.
Five tests, 10 minutes, and a list of edits at the end. Expect it to hold at least one. If you’d rather we did it, the free check includes what we’d change on your pages, alongside what ChatGPT, Perplexity and Gemini currently answer for your 3 questions. And if a page needs the 5 parts built in from the start, that’s the AI citations article, written with all 5 built in.