Reading your citability score
Your Rubric citability score is an estimate, from 0 to 100, of how likely an AI engine is to quote a page when it answers a question on that topic. Seventy is the line: at or above it a page is treated as quotable, below it the page tends to be answered around rather than named. Your site score is the median of your page scores, so one strong page cannot hide twenty weak ones.
- →The score runs 0 to 100 and estimates how quotable a page is to AI engines. It does not count citations you have already earned.
- →70 is the line. At or above it a page is quotable; below it, shown in red, it is answered around rather than named.
- →Your site score is the median of your page scores, so the number reflects your typical page, not your best one.
What the score measures
Your citability score is Rubric's estimate of how likely an AI engine, ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, Gemini, Copilot or Claude, is to quote a page when it answers a question on that topic. It runs from 0 to 100 and is built from 44 checks across three pillars, Known, Findable and Trusted, drawn from CITED, the book Rubric is the companion auditor to.
It is an estimate from on-page, structural and technical signals. Rubric reads what an engine reads and asks, in effect, "if a model were choosing a source for this question, how ready is this page to be the one it names?" It does not count citations you have already earned. It predicts the citability that earns them, which is why the honest way to sanity-check it is to compare it against measured citations over time.
Why 70 is the line
Across Rubric's calibration set, pages scoring 70 and above were quoted far more often than pages just below it, so 70 is drawn everywhere as the line. Above it, a page is treated as quotable. Below it, an engine tends to answer around the page rather than name it as the source. The colour says the same thing at a glance: at or above 70 is cream, below 70 is red. Red only ever means one thing in Rubric, below the line.
Page score vs site score
Every page gets its own score. Your site score is the median of those page scores, not the average. The median is the score of your typical page, so a single excellent page cannot pull the number up and mask a long tail of weak ones. If your site score is 64, half your pages sit below 64. Raising the median means lifting the middle of the pack, not polishing the one page that already scores 90.
The three pillars, in one glance
Every check belongs to one of three pillars, and each pillar is the answer to a question an engine asks before it quotes you.
| Pillar | The question | What it covers |
|---|---|---|
| Known | Do they know who you are? | Entity, Organization and Person schema, sameAs, canonicals, internal links, unique titles and meta |
| Findable | Can they find the answer? | Answer-first openers, question-shaped headings, self-contained sections, crawler access, sitemap |
| Trusted | Do they trust it enough to quote you? | Sourced statistics, named authors, external citations, freshness |
Your report shows a score for each pillar. The weakest pillar is where the work starts.
What to fix first
Do not start with your lowest-scoring page. Start with the fix that moves the most pages at once.
When the score updates
Rubric reads the live page, so the score changes when the page changes and you re-check it. After you ship a fix: