Quotability is Brilad’s term for how easily a single passage can be lifted out of a page and still be correct, complete and clearly attributed. It is our own working concept and checklist, not a metric published by Google, OpenAI or any other search provider. We use it because AI assistants quote passages rather than pages, so a page is only as useful to them as its most quotable passage.
Why we use the idea
Three findings, covered in other guides on this site, point the same way. Retrieval systems split pages into chunks and select a few of them (content chunking). Re-rankers favour passages that answer the question directly (dense retrieval and re-ranking). Models use information at the start of their input best (lost in the middle). Quotability turns those findings into a check that a writer can apply to each paragraph.
The Brilad quotability check
We ask six questions of each important passage:
- Does it name its subject, instead of “it”, “this” or “they”?
- Does it make one main claim?
- Does it include the number, condition or example that makes the claim true?
- Does it make sense without the sentence before it?
- Is the source clear, either you or a named third party?
- Is the answer in the first sentence?
A passage that passes all six can be quoted on its own without distortion. Each “no” is a point where a system might skip the passage, misquote it or credit someone else.
Examples
| Weak | Quotable |
|---|---|
| It usually takes a few weeks. | Google usually recrawls a changed page within a few days to a few weeks, depending on how often it crawls the site. |
| This approach works really well for most clients. | Moving the answer to the first sentence of a section is one of the simplest changes for a page that ranks on page one but does not hold the featured snippet. |
| Studies show AI answers are often wrong. | A 2023 Stanford study found that only about half of sentences in generative search answers were fully supported by their citations. |
Where quotability applies
Quotability leaves room for normal writing. Short, choppy sentences and stripped-out explanation make a page worse. A good page still explains, gives context and makes an argument. Quotability applies to the key passages, usually the first sentence or two of each section and any figures or definitions, so that those parts survive being taken out of context.
Applying it to a page
- List the questions the page should answer.
- For each, find the passage that answers it. If there is none, write one.
- Run the six questions on that passage and rewrite until it passes.
- Move it to the start of its section.
- Leave the rest of the section to explain and support it.
Frequently asked questions
Is quotability a ranking factor?
No search provider uses the term. It is a writing method based on how retrieval and language models are documented to work.
Does it help human readers too?
Yes. Readers who scan a page read the first sentence of each section. A quotable opening sentence serves them in the same way it serves a retrieval system.