Pillar 3 — Answer-Engine Quality
Layer B — GEO Visibility. Owner: Content + SEO. Weight: 30 pts.
Highest-weighted pillar. No public scanner covers it — Cloudflare’s IsItAgentReady scores Pillars 1, 2, 4, 5 but not this one. Pillar 3 is where citation share is actually won.
Items in this pillar
Section titled “Items in this pillar”| # | Item | Status | Authority |
|---|---|---|---|
| 10 | Quick-answer paragraph (40–80 words) | framix convention | House rule |
| 11 | Schema.org JSON-LD (Organization + WebSite + Article / Product / Service + BreadcrumbList; Person schema on every byline) | required | schema.org |
| 12 | Author byline + bio + LinkedIn + credentials; primary-source citations on data-driven pieces | recommended | E-E-A-T convention |
| 13 | Freshness + deprecation governance (dateModified; noindex + banner + canonical + Link: rel="successor-version" on deprecated posts; monthly scan flags > 12 mo) | recommended | House rule informed by Cloudflare Redirects for AI Training behaviour |
Full item descriptions: Universal Requirements § Pillar 3. Writing-side guidance in Content Playbook.
Open questions for v1.2
Section titled “Open questions for v1.2”Three positions in this pillar are debated in the field and not yet incorporated into v1.1:
- Does schema lift citations on already-cited pages? The Ahrefs March 2026 difference-in-differences study says no (
_sources/ahrefs-schema-ai-citations.md); Volpini and Barnard argue structure is the moat anyway. v1.1 keeps schema as required because rich results, voice, and Knowledge Graph eligibility still depend on it. - Do off-site mentions belong in Pillar 3? Lily Ray and Kevin Indig argue third-party mentions are now the primary driver of AI citations (
_sources/expert-lily-ray.md). v1.1 scores on-site only. - Is “training-data presence” a scorable layer distinct from the RAG layer? Britney Muller frames it as a separate, longer-horizon lever (
_sources/expert-britney-muller.md). v1.1 measures the RAG layer only.
Cross-source comparison: _sources/expert-comparison-index.md.
Where this gets enforced
Section titled “Where this gets enforced”Gate B — Content checks all six content items (B.1–B.6) against this pillar before any property ships.