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CitationDesk

Guide · 8 min read

The 10-characteristic checklist for getting cited in AI search.

The 10-characteristic checklist is a framework published by Aleyda Solis in 2026, describing what brands that show up consistently across AI search tend to share. Here's every characteristic, how CitationDesk reads it at page level, and how to audit your own pages.

Why does this matter?

When ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, or Gemini answer a question in your niche, they pick a few sources to cite. Aleyda Solis's article The Characteristics of AI Search Winning Brands (2026) lists ten properties that brands which "show up consistently across AI search platforms tend to share".

Her checklist is written for brands. CitationDesk's GEO Readiness dimension turns each characteristic into one page-level check; the page-level readings below are our interpretation, not hers.

The 10 characteristics

  1. Accessible — the content is in first-paint HTML, not JS-gated. Many AI crawlers do not run JavaScript. If your hero copy renders client-side via React-hydration, a crawler that doesn't may see nothing.
  2. Useful — the page contains a fact, definition, dataset, framework, or synthesis that's genuinely informative — not template-driven filler.
  3. Recognizable — the site has a coherent brand identity: same name everywhere, Organization schema in JSON-LD, consistent visual logo, sameAs links to public profiles.
  4. Extractable — section headings are quote-ready sentences, not marketing fluff ("Why Choose Us" is bad; "Sourdough hydration is calculated by dividing water weight by flour weight" is good). DefinedTerm schema marks key concepts.
  5. Consistent — voice, tone, and claims don't contradict across pages. If your /about says one thing and your /pricing says another, a model reading both gets two answers.
  6. Corroborated — other credible sources reinforce what you say about yourself: reviews, press, community mentions (organic, not spam), reference sites.
  7. Credible — E-E-A-T signals: author byline + Person schema, /about page with operator identity, outbound citations to authoritative primary sources (gov, peer-reviewed, NCHFP, SEC, etc.).
  8. Differentiated — the page expresses an explicit POV in a /learn or methodology section. "Our view:" or "Why we think X" sentences signal a citable source, not a content aggregator.
  9. Fresh — datePublished + dateModified in schema, visible "Last verified [date]" near the content, and an actual refresh cadence.
  10. Transactable — a reader who arrives via the citation can do something: live pricing, working contact form, free tool, email capture.

How we audit each one

Our free Citation Readiness Score runs heuristics for all 10. Some are objective (sameAs count, Schema.org type presence, first-paragraph word count). Others — like whether your voice is consistent across a site, or whether you have a genuine point of view — cannot be judged from one URL by a heuristic, so we use a rough single-page proxy and label it as one rather than pretending to a precision we don't have.

Specifically:

  • Accessible — we check body word count from the no-JS HTML response.
  • Useful — heuristic: more than 400 words of body text.
  • Recognizable — we look for Organization JSON-LD.
  • Extractable — we check for at least two H2 headings.
  • Consistent — a single-URL audit can't verify this, so it uses more than 400 words on the page as a rough proxy; use the free full-site audit to sample many pages at once.
  • Corroborated — we count sameAs hints in JSON-LD blocks as a starting proxy.
  • Credible — we look for Person schema.
  • Differentiated — passes if the page has an opening paragraph; judging a distinct point of view still needs a human read.
  • Fresh — we look for datePublished or dateModified in JSON-LD, article:published_time meta, or <time datetime> elements.
  • Transactable — we look for any link or form containing contact, pricing, signup, or subscribe.

Four gaps to check first

Four gaps worth checking first, because each is a few lines of markup or one habit:

  1. Recognizable (no Organization schema) — sites that ship Article schema but skip Organization. The fix is one JSON-LD block in <head>. Five minutes.
  2. Credible (no Person schema) — content shipped without an author byline + sameAs, so nothing on the page says who wrote it.
  3. Corroborated (no Wikipedia / Reddit / LinkedIn presence) — solo operators ship the site but never plant the corroboration signals elsewhere. We talk about that in our other guides.
  4. Fresh (no dateModified updates) — pages published once and never re-saved.

What to ship this week

If you have one hour this week, ship these three things in order:

  1. Add Organization schema + Person schema in your global <head>. Include sameAs with at least 2 public profiles per entity.
  2. Rewrite the first 100 words of your most-visited page to lead with a quote-ready fact, definition, or statistic.
  3. Add dateModified rendering on every Article-type page, ideally updating monthly.

Then run the Free Citation Readiness Score on your most-visited page and verify the Recognizable, Credible, Corroborated and Fresh checks in GEO Readiness now pass.

See how real sites scored on GEO Readiness

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