Citability is how liftable a piece of content is for an answer engine: whether each section opens with a self-contained answer, carries a takeaways box and an FAQ, and backs every statistic with a date, a source, and attribution. A structural property, not a style opinion.
Why it matters
Answer engines quote passages they can lift cleanly. A paragraph that answers a question in its first sentence gets pulled; one that clears its throat first gets skipped.
So citability is not about writing well in general. It is about a specific set of structures an engine looks for when it decides what to cite as the source.
Getting this wrong is quiet. The content reads fine to a person and is invisible to the engine, which cites a competitor who structured the same answer to be liftable.
How Jinn treats it
Ghost scores citability with a deterministic structural check, not an AI judgement. It looks for five things: an answer-first opener per section, a self-contained capsule, a takeaways box, an FAQ, and evidence on every statistic.
The score runs 0 to 100 against a hard floor, and it fails safe: empty or unreadable content comes back as unavailable, never as a pass. Because it is structural, the same input always scores the same, with no model opinion in the loop.
Related terms
Citable is a structure, not a style.
Answer engines lift content built to be lifted. See the free tools that check and fix the structure.