The whole rubric, published before you buy the audit.

What this is

This is the full rubric a Cite Unseen audit scores against, published and versioned, so you can read what is measured before deciding whether to buy the measurement.

Eight dimensions, thirty-three checks, one hundred points. Thirteen checks are deterministic: a machine settles them from the collected evidence, and the free scan runs those thirteen. The other twenty are proposed by an assisted review and rated by a person, who records the reason a customer might dispute. A check the evidence cannot establish is marked inconclusive, and its points leave the denominator instead of counting as a failure.

Nothing in this rubric predicts a citation. It describes conditions a site controls, on one day, against a published standard. Whether meeting them leads an answer engine to quote you is a question nobody controls, and the rubric does not claim to answer it.

The eight dimensions

• Can an answer engine actually fetch your pages?6 checks · 15 points If a retrieval system cannot fetch your pages reliably, nothing else on this list matters. Everything downstream depends on this working.
• Does an answer engine know which company your site is about?4 checks · 15 points An engine has to decide which organization a page is about before it can recommend that organization. Conflicting names and missing contact facts force it to guess, and it may guess wrong.
• Can a passage from your site be quoted on its own?5 checks · 20 points This is the largest single block of points because it is the mechanism. Answer engines reuse passages that stand on their own; copy that needs the surrounding page to make sense is rarely quoted.
• Do you answer the questions a buyer actually asks?4 checks · 15 points Coverage decides whether you are a candidate answer at all. A question with no owned page cannot be answered from your site by anything.
• Can a stranger check who runs this and what you promise?4 checks · 15 points Assurance is a precondition for being recommended. An engine asked to suggest a provider has little reason to name one whose operator, credentials, and outcomes cannot be checked.
• Does your markup say the same thing your page says?4 checks · 10 points Structured data is the one place you state your identity in a form nothing has to infer from prose. It is also the cheapest of these to fix.
• Is your crawler treatment a decision or a default?3 checks · 5 points Crawler treatment should be a decision you made rather than a default nobody chose. It is worth few points because it is usually already fine, and catastrophic on the rare occasion it is not.
• Will you be able to tell whether any of this worked?3 checks · 5 points Without a baseline fixed before results are known, any later movement can be explained after the fact. This is what makes a re-audit mean something.

How a score is read

The interpretation is advisory. A high score does not guarantee visibility, citation, sentiment, traffic, or revenue. A low score does not prove that a site is absent from AI-generated answers.

• A — Strong foundation (85–100). Prioritize measurement, differentiated evidence, and targeted gaps.
• B — Credible but inconsistent (70–85). Fix high-impact entity, evidence, and citation gaps.
• C — Material discoverability friction (50–70). Execute a structured 30-day remediation backlog.
• F — Weak or unclear foundation (0–50). Fix retrieval, identity, trust, and core content before monitoring spend.

Two complete audits are published with their evidence: the operator's own site, which scores a C, and a redacted audit of a site he does not own.