How is this check scored?
Every threshold on this page comes from one source: the citation-readiness scorer Gadex publishes. Per Gadex's own build, the weights below are read directly from that scorer and a test fails the build if the documented figure stops matching the applied one. A pass earns the full 12 points, a warning earns half, a fail earns none.
| Result | How it is decided |
|---|---|
| Pass | Three or more outbound links or attribution phrases. |
| Warn | One or two. |
| Fail | None at all. |
Why does this check exist?
A page that cites nothing is asking to be taken on trust. A page that cites its sources lets both a reader and a model verify the parts that matter, which makes the whole page safer to repeat.
Citations also place a page in a context. A model retrieving an isolated page has no way to relate it to the literature it belongs to; a page that links to the standards body, the vendor documentation, or the original research is legible as part of a conversation.
The threshold is deliberately low. Three sources is not a bibliography — it is the minimum that distinguishes an evidenced page from an asserted one.
How do you fix it?
- Link the primary source for every claim that is not yours: the documentation, the standard, the filing, the original research.
- Prefer the primary source over an article about it. A link to a blog post summarising a study is weaker than a link to the study.
- Where you cannot link, name. "Per the 2026 Search Central documentation" is attribution even without an anchor.
How often do pages fail this check?
Per Gadex's own measurement across the 91 content pages on this site, using the checker published at /tools/ai-search-visibility-checker/: 35 pass, 54 carry a warning, and 2 fail. Per that same run, 62 per cent of Gadex pages have something to fix on this check alone.
Those figures include the pages Gadex fails. A checker whose author exempts itself from the checking is marketing rather than measurement, so the numbers are generated from the built site on every deploy and the build fails if the published figures stop matching what Gadex actually scores. When Gadex fixes pages, the numbers move on their own.
What does this check miss?
- A link to your own domain counts. The check has no way to know which domain the page belongs to, so internal links inflate the number.
- It counts links, not quality. Three links to weak sources pass; one link to a definitive one warns.
- In plain-text input the check falls back to counting bare URLs and attribution phrases, which is cruder than reading real anchors.
Where does this guidance come from?
The scoring rules are Gadex's. The reasoning about why these properties matter draws on the platforms' own published guidance:
- Google Search Central: creating helpful, reliable, people-first content — on self-evident expertise, sourcing, and who the content is for.
- Google Search Central: Article structured data — on author and date fields, and what they are used for.
- OpenAI: bots and crawlers — on how ChatGPT fetches and attributes pages it surfaces.
How we measured this
The counts above come from running the Gadex scorer over the built HTML of every content page on this site, reading each page's main content region only — nav, header and footer links are excluded, because a visitor pastes an article rather than a whole document. Legal boilerplate, the 404 page and generated tool result renderings are excluded as pages where the score would be meaningless. Per that run, the 91 pages counted are the ones a reader could plausibly ask an assistant to summarise.
The scoring thresholds on this page are read from the same module the tool runs, and a test fails the build if the weight documented here stops matching the weight the scorer applies. What none of this can tell you is whether an answer engine will cite a page: citation depends on the model, the prompt, the index and the competing sources, none of which is visible in your markup.
Common questions
Does linking out leak ranking value?
This check is about citation readiness, not link equity, so it takes no position on that debate. What it measures is whether the page shows its evidence. A page that hides its sources to protect PageRank is harder to quote accurately.
We cite internal research we cannot publish. What then?
State the methodology instead. An unpublishable dataset described precisely — what was measured, over what population, when — is more citable than an unexplained number, even without a link.