This tool asks a narrower question than general AI visibility: not whether a model can read the page, but whether there is anything on it a model would want to lift. That turns out to be a much harder bar, and the scores are correspondingly low. Being readable is a matter of configuration. Being quotable is a matter of having written something specific, attributed and self-contained — which is a writing problem, and writing problems do not get fixed by a plugin.
Here is where that sits. The median is 46/100, which ranks it 17 of the 25 measures in this dataset. The middle half of results falls between 17 and 65 — a band 48 points wide. That is wide: sites genuinely diverge here, which is to say getting ahead is still possible.
How the scores are distributed
An average on its own misleads. The chart below splits all 1,499 scans into five score bands, totalling 100%. The spread is wide and fairly even, which is what a measure looks like while it is still being adopted unevenly.
- 0–19
- 20–39
- 40–59
- 60–79
- 80–100
| Score band | AI Citation |
|---|---|
| 0–19 | 27% · 404 |
| 20–39 | 16% · 238 |
| 40–59 | 26% · 392 |
| 60–79 | 23% · 339 |
| 80–100 | 8% · 126 |
| Total runs | 1,499 |
The grade mix
The same data as letters: A+ 95–100, A 85–94, B 75–84, C 65–74, D 50–64 and F below 50.
Where your score stands
Expect a low number here even on pages you are proud of, and do not read it as a verdict on quality. It measures a particular kind of usefulness: whether the page contains passages that survive being taken out of context. Long, flowing, beautifully argued prose scores badly on exactly that measure — which is a fair criticism from a machine's point of view and no criticism at all from a reader's.
| Tool | 10th | 25th | Median | 75th | 90th | Mean | Lowest | Highest |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| AI Citation | 0 | 17 | 46 | 65 | 78 | 42.2 | 0 | 100 |
How to read it: 17 is bottom-quartile, 46 is a typical page, 65 starts the upper quartile and 78 or above is the top 10%. These thresholds apply to this tool only.
The checks that fail most
The failures divide into substance and shape. Substance is whether there is anything concrete to quote — a figure, a definition, a dated fact, a source. Shape is whether it can be extracted cleanly: short paragraphs, a heading that states the question, an answer that begins immediately underneath. Most pages fail on shape while having the substance somewhere in them.
| Check | Did not pass | Weight |
|---|---|---|
| FAQ / Q&A schema | 94% | Partial |
| Publish / update date | 84% | Partial |
| Expert quotes | 82% | Partial |
| Named author / byline | 76% | Partial |
| Question-style headings | 75% | Partial |
| Statistics & concrete figures | 69% | Hard fail |
| Structured data | 56% | Partial |
| Substantial content (≥700 words) | 51% | Partial |
| Clear definitions ("X is …") | 47% | Partial |
| Lists / tables for extractability | 36% | Partial |
| Concise, standalone passages | 33% | Hard fail |
| Outbound citations to sources | 27% | Hard fail |
“Hard fail” means the check’s full weighting is lost; “partial” means only part of the score is. Rates are the share of scans in which the check ran and did not pass.
The weakest areas
This tool groups its checks into categories. The chart below shows how often each category was the lowest-scoring one in a scan — which area is most often the weak link. It is not the average score in that category; it is how often it came last.
“Trust Signals (E-E-A-T)” was the weakest area in 48% of scans.
What to fix first
Take one question your page already answers and restructure that section: heading phrased as the question, answer in the first two sentences, specifics rather than generalities. Do it once and check whether the score moves; it usually does more than a week of general editing, because you have converted existing substance into extractable form.
A typical scan passes 4.7 of 12 checks and leaves 7.3 open items behind. What drags a score down is usually not one catastrophe but accumulated small omissions.
Run the AI Citation Checker on your own page
Month by month
The figures on this page are replaced at every refresh. At the end of each month a permanent edition is published for that month and never edited again — which is the only reason this series can be compared at all. One edition has been published so far; when the second lands this section will set the two months side by side.
| Edition | Median | vs. previous | Scored 80+ | Issues/run | Runs |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| August 2026 | 46 | baseline | 8% | 7.3 | 1,499 |
Frequently asked questions
What makes a passage quotable to an AI?
Being complete on its own. A model lifting two sentences needs those two sentences to make sense with nothing around them — so a claim that depends on the previous paragraph, or a pronoun whose referent is three sentences back, cannot be used. Add a concrete number or a named source and it becomes a passage worth quoting rather than merely quotable.
Should I add statistics just to score better here?
No, and inventing them would be much worse than the low score. The check is a proxy for specificity: pages that make measurable claims tend to be more useful than pages that make general ones. If you have nothing concrete to say on a subject, the honest fix is to do the work that produces something concrete, not to decorate the page with numbers.
Does being quotable mean losing traffic to AI answers?
Sometimes, and it is worth being clear-eyed about it. A page that answers a simple question completely may see that question answered without a click. The trade is visibility and attribution in a surface you otherwise do not appear in at all — and for questions where the answer is a starting point rather than the whole job, the citation is what brings the reader through.
What is a good score on the AI Citation Checker?
In this dataset the median is 46/100, so scoring 46 puts you exactly in the middle. 65 is the start of the upper quartile and 78 or above is the top 10%; below 17 is the bottom quarter. Those thresholds are specific to this tool — the 25 measures in this dataset have very different medians, so 70 here and 70 elsewhere do not mean the same thing.
Which check fails most often on the AI Citation Checker?
“FAQ / Q&A schema”, which did not pass in 94% of scans. The costliest failures, though, are the ones scored as hard fails — this tool has 3, the most common being “Statistics & concrete figures” at 69%.
Questions that govern the whole series — how the sample is collected, how sites are anonymized, how often the figures are refreshed — are answered in the methodology on the hub.
Using this data
The figures, tables and charts on this page are free to reuse under CC BY 4.0; the only condition is a link back to this page. Suggested citation: SeoMods — AI Citation Checker benchmarks, 2 September 2026, https://seomods.com/seo-score-benchmarks/ai-citation-checker. If you need to cite by date, use the August 2026 edition instead: this page changes at every refresh and that one never does.