Five checks for a page that ranks but never gets cited
The five faults that keep a good page out of AI answers, each with a by-hand check, a command you can run across a site, and the fix.
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The five faults that keep a good page out of AI answers, each with a by-hand check, a command you can run across a site, and the fix.
When to phrase a heading as a question, when a keyword label is still the right call, and how to check every heading on a site in one pass.
An element-by-element inventory of what AI crawlers keep, discard, and only conditionally read — plus the parts you can exclude on purpose.
What happens to a page between fetch and answer, the eight signals answer-readiness turns on, and how to check every one of them by hand and at scale.
Three acronyms, one page. Here is what answer engines and generative search changed about optimization, and what they did not.
The highest-weighted answer-readiness signal is a passage that answers its own heading in one breath. What it is, how to write one, how to check it.
A walk through what actually gets extracted from a page when an AI system reads it, and which parts of your HTML never make the trip.
Pages that rank fine and still never get cited usually share the same five faults. Each one is fixable in an afternoon.