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Methodology→Evidence Engine→Citation Stack
Evidence Engine

Citation Stack™

A 4-layer architecture that maps your content optimization to the RAG pipeline. Each layer corresponds to a stage of AI retrieval — miss one, miss the citation.

Why layers matter

AI retrieval is a pipeline, not a single step. Your content must pass ACCESS to get crawled, STRUCTURE to get parsed, SEMANTICS to get retrieved, and AUTHORITY to get cited. Failure at any layer blocks citation.

1
ACCESS
Crawl & Index

Can AI crawlers reach and index your content?

→robots.txt allowing GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot
→Sitemap.xml with accurate lastmod dates
→Server response under 200ms
→No paywall or auth barriers on key pages
2
STRUCTURE
Parse & Chunk

Can AI extract clean chunks from your content?

→Clean HTML without render dependencies
→Semantic markup (headers, lists, tables)
→Schema.org structured data
→Clear content hierarchy
3
SEMANTICS
Embed & Retrieve

Do your chunks match user query embeddings?

→Answer nuggets (self-contained facts)
→Q&A format headers
→Explicit definitions and explanations
→Topic clustering and coverage
4
AUTHORITY
Rank & Cite

Does AI trust your content enough to cite it?

→Domain authority and backlinks
→Expert credentials and citations
→Third-party validation (Wikipedia, G2, Reddit)
→Limitations and nuance (Claude honesty boost)

Pipeline flow

Content moves through these stages sequentially. Each gate must pass for the next to matter:

1
Crawler visits URL (ACCESS)
→
2
Content parsed into chunks (STRUCTURE)
→
3
Chunks embedded into vectors (SEMANTICS)
→
4
Retrieval matches query to chunks (SEMANTICS)
→
5
Model ranks and selects sources (AUTHORITY)
→
6
Citation appears in response (AUTHORITY)

Layer diagnostics

How to identify which layer is blocking citation:

ACCESS
PASS

Pages appear in AI's index

FAIL

Pages not crawled or indexed

STRUCTURE
PASS

Schema validates, clean extraction

FAIL

Malformed markup, JS-only content

SEMANTICS
PASS

RAG simulation shows good embedding distance

FAIL

Low similarity scores

AUTHORITY
PASS

Citations appear when retrieved

FAIL

Retrieved but not cited

Diagnose your Citation Stack

Stack Audit — $350