About CiteSnap
CiteSnap scores any page 0–100 on whether AI answer engines can find, parse and cite it. It exists because “is my site ready for AI search” had a lot of opinions attached to it and no instrument.
By the CiteSnap team · Published · Last updated
What the score is
The score is a measure of eligibility, not a prediction. It says whether an answer engine can retrieve, attribute and quote a page — not whether it will, which depends on the query and the competing sources and is not observable from outside.
What it deliberately does not do
Three things, each of which would make the number bigger and less honest.
- It does not guess. When a measurement fails — a robots.txt that times out, a challenge page — the check reports not checked and its points leave the denominator. Awarding full marks there once scored a site that blocks GPTBot as though it welcomed everyone.
- It does not oversell a check. llms.txt is worth 4 points and the fix text says the evidence for it is nil. A tool that inflates a check to seem comprehensive is worth less than one that admits the check is minor.
- It does not hide a heuristic. Where a check infers rather than measures, the summary says so. False positives cost more trust than they save time.
How the extension handles your data
It does not handle it, because nothing leaves your browser. The extension holds activeTab and scripting and nothing else — no host permissions, no content scripts running in the background, no analytics, no server.
The website is different by necessity: it has to fetch the URL you give it. It fetches that page once, anonymously, with no cookies, and does not store the URL unless you explicitly create a share link.
The scoring model
Fourteen checks across three levers, weighted by how much failing each one costs. The full breakdown is on the GEO score checker page.
Frequently asked questions
Who makes CiteSnap?
CiteSnap is an independent tool, not affiliated with OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Perplexity or any other AI vendor. The engines are named because they are what the scoring model is about, not because anyone endorses this.
Does the extension send my browsing data anywhere?
No. The Chrome extension has exactly two permissions — activeTab and scripting — and no host permissions, no analytics and no backend. The scoring engine runs inside the page you are looking at, and the only network requests it makes are same-origin fetches of that site’s own robots.txt, llms.txt and raw HTML.
Is the scoring model the same in the extension and on the website?
Yes, literally the same code. The scoring engine is a shared package with no IO of its own; the extension feeds it a rendered DOM from your tab, and the website feeds it a server-parsed document. Scores can still differ, because those are genuinely different views of a page — the website sees what a non-JavaScript crawler sees.
How are the weights decided?
By judgement about how much each failure actually costs a citation, not by a model fitted to data — there is no public dataset of what answer engines cite. The weights are documented, versioned and stated openly so you can disagree with them: 25 points for retrieval, 15 for source trust, 60 for extractability.