Free · AI-powered · 8 scans/hr

AI Citation Scanner

AI search engines and AI Overviews cite pages that have strong, well-formatted citations. Our AI-powered scanner reads your page, extracts every factual claim, classifies the citation type, and scores formatting quality. Find unbacked statistics, missing source links, and low-authority references in one click.

Page URL to scan

We extract the page, then use AI to identify every citation, source, statistic, and quote — and grade their formatting.

How it works

A short, focused workflow — input, run, read the result.

Paste your article URL
Enter any public article URL. The tool fetches the page and analyzes the text with AI.
Review the citation report
See every detected citation with type, source authority, formatting quality, and a short context quote.
Strengthen weak citations
Replace unbacked claims with linked primary sources, upgrade stats to .gov/.edu/origin, and add inline links for every statistic.

What is an AI citation, and why does it decide whether ChatGPT cites your page?

An AI citation is a factual claim in your article that an AI engine can lift, attribute, and link to a source. Pages with strong citations get cited. Pages with 'studies show' get skipped. The scanner finds the difference.

AI Overviews, ChatGPT search, and Perplexity all cite pages the same way: they extract a factual claim, verify it against a recognized source, and render the citation as an inline link or footnote. A page with 30 statistics and zero source links looks citable on the surface but invisible to a model that needs a primary source to attribute. Citation formatting, not citation count, is the deciding factor.The scanner reads any public article, extracts every factual claim, and grades each one on two axes. Authority reflects the source: a .gov study scores high, a random blog scores low. Formatting reflects how the citation is presented: an inline link with author and date scores high, a naked 'experts say' scores low. Both axes matter, and both are scored 0-100 per claim. The page gets an overall formatting score that predicts AI citability.The output shows every detected claim with its type (statistic, quote, study, attribution), its source authority, its formatting quality, and a short context quote. You replace the weak citations with linked primary sources, upgrade generic stats to .gov or .edu references, and add inline attribution. The result is a page AI engines can actually cite, not just one that contains facts.

0-100

Formatting score per claim and overall

Free AI scans per hour per IP

Grading axes: authority and formatting

What this AI citation scanner checks

Every signal that decides whether AI engines can attribute a claim in your article.

Factual claim extraction — identifies every statistic, quote, study reference, and attribution in the article using AI parsing.
Source authority grading — rates each citation source as high, medium, low, or none based on .gov, .edu, primary research, or recognized publication.
Formatting quality score — grades each citation on inline linking, author attribution, date, and clear context, the patterns AI engines prefer.
Inline link detection — flags claims presented without a link to the source, which AI engines cannot easily attribute.
Unbacked statistic flag — highlights numbers in the article that have no citation at all, the most common reason a page is not cited.
Named author requirement — checks that each citation has an attributed author, which is a strong AI citability signal.
Recency check — flags citations older than 24 months on freshness-sensitive topics like SEO, AI, and finance.
Context quote — shows a short snippet around each citation so you can see exactly what AI will read when it considers citing you.

Who uses this AI citation scanner

Editorial and SEO teams who want their articles to show up in AI Overviews and ChatGPT answers, not just Google blue links.

In-house SEOs

Your 200-article library is full of stats, but AI Overviews cite competitors 5x more than your pages.

Find the unlinked statistics, upgrade them to .gov or .edu sources, watch citation rate climb quarter over quarter.

Content marketers

Your team writes 8 articles a week and you suspect 'studies show' copy is killing AI citability.

Scan every draft, replace vague phrasing with named authors, dates, and inline links before publish.

Agencies

You deliver 30 GEO-optimized articles a month and need a citation quality gate before client review.

Run every article, reject any draft with a formatting score below 70, fix the gaps before sending.

Bloggers

You write about AI and want ChatGPT to cite your posts on 'best LLM for coding' style queries.

Audit your last 20 posts, add inline links to primary research, double your AI citation rate.

Enterprise SEOs

Your 5,000-page knowledge base has high authority but weak inline citations, so AI engines skip it.

Identify the systemic citation gaps, ship a template fix, restore AI citability across the whole domain.

AI content teams

You generate 50 articles a month with AI and worry the output has fabricated or weakly-sourced stats.

Run every draft through the scanner, catch the unbacked claims, ship only articles with real primary sources.

Related glossary terms

Want a deeper dive? These glossary entries explain the concepts behind this tool.

Frequently Asked
Questions

AI-powered citation scanning for SEO and AI Overview visibility in 2026. Find unbacked claims, missing sources, and weak authority links.

We fetch the page server-side, strip HTML, then send the text to AI with a structured prompt asking it to find every citation, source, statistic, quote, or claim, and grade each one's authority (high/medium/low/none) and formatting quality.

A 0-100 score reflecting whether citations follow Google's and AI Overviews' preferred patterns: inline links to primary sources, attribution to named authors, recent dates, and clear context. A score of 80+ means citations are well-formed for AI citability.

Each scan uses AI tokens (~$0.01-0.03 per call), and we offer this tool free. 8/hr is the rate we can sustainably support. If you need higher limits, see the SERPView product.

Authority is about the source itself (.gov/.edu/original research = high, random blog = low). Formatting is about how the citation is presented in your article (clear attribution, proper link, date = good, naked 'studies show' = bad). Both matter for AI citability.

The AI workflow has multilingual support, but the prompt and output format are optimized for English. Non-English pages will get results but with lower accuracy on classification nuance.

More free tools

Free, no signup required. Built by the team behind SERPView.

Google SERP Simulator Tool

Simulate exactly how your page appears in Google search results. Live SERP preview with title, URL, and description, plus character and pixel-width warnings before you publish.

Try it free

Meta Description Generator

Generate 5 AI meta description variants from your page title. See the live SERP preview and copy the winner to your CMS.