Guide · 9 min read
Citation Oracle archetypes — the multipliers behind our page planning.
An archetype is a structural page type — original-research dataset, programmatic-unique-data table, methodology page — and our internal planning heuristic gives each one a seed citation-potential multiplier. Here's the table of 15, how they combine, and the four archetypes we permanently reject. The free score does not use these multipliers.
Why do archetypes matter?
Pages aren't citable in the abstract. They're citable because of what they are: an original-research dataset, a programmatic-unique-data table, a methodology page, a Person + Organization schema chain, a Wikipedia citation entry. Each of these is an archetype, and we expect each to have a different chance of being cited by ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, or Gemini. The multipliers below are our starting guesses, not measurements.
The Citation Oracle is an internal heuristic we use to decide which pages to build first. It is not part of the free Citation Readiness Score, which checks the 43 signals listed on the methodology page. It starts from 15 seed multipliers, one per archetype.
The 15 seed multipliers
Higher multiplier = stronger citation expectation. Negative = hard reject.
| Archetype | Multiplier |
|---|---|
| wikipedia_citation_secured | +95 — A Wikipedia article cites your facts. |
| unique_dataset_page | +90 — A fact or dataset not published anywhere else. |
| ai_visibility_optimized_page | +85 — 8 or more of the 10 characteristics pass. |
| methodology_page_first_party | +75 — An explainer that establishes "how we know". |
| definedterm_schema_per_concept | +70 — DefinedTerm structured data on every glossary term. |
| citation_chain_inbound_3_plus | +70 — Your facts cited by ≥3 third-parties create a corroboration moat. |
| open_dataset_json_api | +65 — Machine-readable for LLM training + retrieval. |
| schema_dataset_with_distribution | +60 — Dataset + Distribution schema explicit. |
| person_schema_with_sameAs | +50 — Operator identity coherent across the site. |
| podcast_guest_transcript_indexed | +50 — A published transcript of a podcast appearance. |
| haro_qwoted_featured_pitch | +45 — Quoted by a journalist via HARO or Qwoted. |
| reddit_organic_corroboration | +40 — Genuine, non-spam mentions in Reddit threads. |
| linkedin_zero_click_framework | +35 — A framework posted natively on LinkedIn. |
| llms_txt_advertise_with_openapi | 0 — Set to 0 in June 2026: we found no AI provider that says it reads llms.txt. |
| freshness_per_page | +20 — dateModified within 30 days. |
How they stack on a single page
A single page can hit several archetypes at once. For example, our HoldLens case study hits:
- methodology_page_first_party (+75) — explains the audit
- person_schema_with_sameAs (+50) — operator byline
- freshness_per_page (+20) — datePublished + dateModified set
The heuristic combines the archetypes a page hits into one projected-citation weight, which we use only to rank our own work. It is a planning estimate, not a measured citation rate.
The four immutable hard-rejects
Some archetypes carry a multiplier of −1000 and are filtered before ranking. They cannot be re-enabled by any configuration:
- ai_generated_filler — pages written by an LLM with no original substance.
- scraped_content_no_attribution — copies of someone else's data without citation.
- cloak_to_bots — serving different HTML to GPTBot than humans.
- fake_entity_schema — Organization or Person schema describing entities that don't exist or misrepresent.
How the multipliers self-calibrate
The heuristic is designed to recalibrate: every page that ships logs its archetype claim + projected citations + actual citations (measured 7 + 30 days post-ship). After 10+ rows per archetype, the multiplier adjusts toward the mean actual-to-projected ratio, bounded ±50% per cycle to prevent oscillation. Until an archetype has that many rows, its multiplier on this page is the seed value, not a measured one.
The free Citation Readiness Score does not report archetypes; it checks the 43 signals on the methodology page. Run it to see which of those your page passes.
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