The three pillars: Known, Findable, Trusted
Rubric groups its 44 checks into three pillars: Known, Findable and Trusted. Each pillar is a question an AI engine asks before it quotes a page: do they know who you are, can they find the answer, and do they trust it enough to name you. Your report scores each pillar separately, and the weakest one is where you start.
- →Known asks whether an engine can resolve and attribute the page to a clear entity.
- →Findable asks whether an engine can locate a liftable answer on the page.
- →Trusted asks whether the evidence is strong enough for an engine to quote you by name.
The three questions an engine asks
An AI engine does not read your page the way a person does. It retrieves candidate passages, decides which one best answers the question, and then decides whether to name the source. Rubric's three pillars map onto exactly those decisions, so a low pillar score points at the specific place an engine gets stuck. They come from CITED, the book by Chris McCarron that Rubric is the companion auditor to.
Known: do they know who you are?
Known is discovery: can an engine work out who published this page and attribute a quote to you. If an engine cannot resolve the entity behind a page, it will happily use the information and leave you unnamed.
This pillar covers entity clarity (Organization and Person schema with sameAs to your real profiles), content-type schema, schema completeness and validity, canonical tags, internal links, entity density in the prose, unique (not duplicated) titles and meta, and distinct (not near-duplicate) content. The single highest-leverage Known fix on most sites is adding Organization and Person schema with sameAs.
Findable: can they find the answer?
Findable is retrieval: can an engine locate a clean, liftable answer on the page. Engines lift the first self-contained passage that answers the query, so a page that buries its answer under preamble is hard to quote even when the answer is there.
This pillar covers answer-first openers (a direct 40 to 70 word answer near the top), sections that open with a direct answer, question and claim-shaped H2 and H3 headings, self-contained sections, one H1 that lands in the snippet window, sensible title and meta lengths, tables and lists, FAQ and HowTo schema, image alt coverage, robots rules that allow the AI bots, an XML sitemap, crawlers not being network-blocked, a fast server response, an indexable page, readable prose and definitional openers. It is the largest pillar, because most of what makes a page quotable is about structure.
Trusted: do they trust it enough to quote you?
Trusted is citation: is the evidence strong enough for an engine to put your name next to a claim. Engines prefer sources they can stand behind, so pages with sourced facts and clear authorship are quoted more often than confident but unsupported prose.
This pillar covers substantive content, statistic density, external source links, a named author with E-E-A-T attribution, statistics that carry a source, freshness (updated within twelve months), and review or rating schema.
Which pillar to fix first
Fix the lowest-scoring pillar first, but with one rule of thumb: a low Known score usually blocks the other two. An engine that cannot tell who published a page is reluctant to attribute anything to it, so entity and schema fixes often unlock the value of your Findable and Trusted work. After Known, take whichever of Findable or Trusted scores lower.
How the pillars roll up into your score
The pillar scores are a lens, not the sum. Each of the 44 checks carries its own weight, and those weights differ by engine, so your overall page score is the weighted result of every check. The pillars group those checks into three readable numbers so you can see where a site is weakest at a glance, then drop into the Action Plan to fix it.