Content guideGEO content creation
How to audit existing content for AI-citation readiness
You don't need to rewrite everything — you need to know which pages are actually costing you citations. Here's the audit.
What our own tracked corpus shows AI engines actually cite
Across every real (non-mock) scan in PingMyBrand's own store, here's the breakdown of source-page categories AI engines cited when answering — the real evidence behind the structure advice below, not a guess.
Full methodology + live numbers: The State of AI Citations report.
Step 1
Pull the page's first 2 sentences and read them cold
Do they answer the page's core question with no prior context needed? If the definition or answer doesn't appear until paragraph 3, that's the single highest-leverage fix — move it up.
Step 2
Check for a real heading hierarchy
Grep the page's rendered HTML for H2/H3 tags. A long page with zero subheadings, or headings that are just visual style rather than the sub-question they answer, gives an engine nothing to navigate by.
Step 3
Check whether the page has any structured data at all
View source, search for application/ld+json. A commercial or comparison page with none is invisible to the structured-data layer entirely — even if the prose itself is good, it's competing on prose alone.
Step 4
Find the page's one quotable claim — or notice it doesn't have one
If you can't point to a single standalone, sourced sentence a person could copy-paste as a citation, the page has no citation surface area, regardless of word count.
Step 5
Re-probe the exact buyer question the page targets
Ask ChatGPT/Perplexity the real question this page is meant to answer. If your domain isn't named or cited, the gap is real and specific — not a general 'we need more content' problem.
PingMyBrand's report runs a version of this audit automatically against your own domain — the ranked fix list is this checklist applied to your real pages, not a generic template.