Answer engines quote passages. Frequently, an answer engine never cites a good page. The most frequent cause is that no paragraph in the page answers a question by itself.

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The test

  1. Copy a paragraph from the page.
  2. Read the paragraph alone.
  3. Find if it answers a question without the paragraph before it.
If it does, the paragraph is quotable. If it needs an introduction, a pronoun reference, or a heading to have meaning, an answer engine cannot use it. Most marketing pages fail this test in all their paragraphs.

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What makes a passage quotable

  • It answers in the first sentence. Put the conclusion first and the reasoning after it. If you build slowly to a point, you lose the quote.
  • It is self-contained. Write the name of the subject, not “it” or “this”. When an answer engine puts a passage into an answer, the passage loses its context.
  • It is specific. Give numbers, conditions, and limits. “Pricing starts at $X per user for teams under ten” is quotable. “Flexible pricing for teams of all sizes” is not quotable.
  • It uses the words of the question. Read Query fanouts.

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Structure that helps

  • Headings that are questions.
  • Short paragraphs, with one claim in each paragraph.
  • Tables for comparisons, because a table row is a self-contained fact.
  • Explicit statements of what an item is not. Answer engines frequently quote these statements, because they resolve a difference that the user considered.

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Structure that causes problems

  • Long blocks of text, with the answer hidden inside.
  • Information that is only in an image, a PDF, or a video without a transcript.
  • Key facts in three different sections, thus no section is complete.
  • A conclusion that only refers vaguely to the previous text.

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Where to start

Do not write the full site again. Select the pages that you already have for the questions where you already appear. Then, make their key paragraphs self-contained. This is the visibility work with the lowest cost, because retrieval already works. Only the quotation fails.