Find out why AI isn't citing your website — and how to fix it
Zitatix scans any website and scores how findable, quotable, understandable, and trustworthy it is to AI answer engines like ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and Claude. Enter a URL to get a Citation Readiness Score out of 100, an AI Visibility Index gathered from real web search, and a prioritized action plan showing how many points each fix recovers.
Run a free scan at zitatix.com — 3 free single-page analyses per month, no credit card required. Or view example audits first.
What Zitatix checks
Every scan runs roughly twenty-five deterministic checks across four pillars, each worth 25 points of the Citation Readiness Score.
- Findable — HTTPS, robots.txt access for AI crawlers such as GPTBot, ClaudeBot, and PerplexityBot, an XML sitemap, healthy response status, indexability, and canonical URLs.
- Quotable — one clear H1, structured subheadings, question-and-answer content, lists and tables, substantial content depth, and concise standalone paragraphs AI can lift verbatim.
- Understandable — a descriptive title tag, meta description, semantic HTML landmarks, image alt text, a declared language, Open Graph metadata, and a healthy content-to-code ratio.
- Trustworthy — JSON-LD structured data, organization or author identity, about and contact pages, machine-readable publish dates, outbound citations, a favicon, and linked social profiles.
The two scores, explained
The Citation Readiness Score measures what you control on the page and is fully reproducible: run the same scan twice and you get the same result. The AI Visibility Index measures your reputation off-site — how well AI engines already recognize and corroborate your brand through independent sources.
| Metric | What it measures | How it is computed |
|---|---|---|
| Citation Readiness Score | On-page readiness for AI citation | Deterministic checks across the four pillars, 100 points total |
| AI Visibility Index | Off-site recognition and corroboration | Live web search for independent mentions, directories, reviews, and knowledge-graph signals |
How a scan works
- Enter a URL and, optionally, one sentence describing what the company does — this improves the accuracy of the off-site analysis.
- Choose to analyze a single page or run a website audit; an audit crawls the homepage plus key pages discovered from the sitemap — up to 10 pages per audit on Pro, with larger audits available on the Agency plan.
- Zitatix fetches the pages, robots.txt, and sitemap, then runs the deterministic on-page checks.
- A live web search gathers off-site evidence: independent mentions, reviews, directories, and competitor visibility.
- You receive a shareable report with both scores, a competitor landscape, and an action plan sorted by impact, showing how many points each fix recovers.
Frequently asked questions
What is Answer Engine Optimization (AEO)?
Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) is the practice of structuring a website so that AI answer engines can easily find, understand, quote, and trust its content when generating answers for users.
How does Zitatix score my website?
It produces a deterministic Citation Readiness Score out of 100 across four pillars — Findable, Quotable, Understandable, and Trustworthy — plus an AI Visibility Index that measures how well AI engines already know and corroborate your brand.
How can I make my website findable by AI like ChatGPT and Perplexity?
Allow AI crawlers in robots.txt, publish a sitemap.xml, add semantic HTML and JSON-LD structured data, write concise quotable answers, and build off-site corroboration. Zitatix returns a prioritized action plan for each.
What is the difference between the Citation Readiness Score and the AI Visibility Index?
The Citation Readiness Score reflects what is under your control on the page itself and is fully reproducible. The AI Visibility Index reflects how well AI answer engines already recognize and trust your entity based on external evidence from live web search.
Further reading
Learn more about the discipline and the scoring:
- What is Answer Engine Optimization (AEO)?
- How the Citation Readiness Score and AI Visibility Index are calculated
- Example audits with dated before/after scores
The checks Zitatix runs are grounded in the published guidance of the platforms themselves:
Scoring methodology version 1.2, last updated .