Citation & Trust Auditor
Broken links kill AI trust. Verify your citations are alive and authoritative to boost your Reference Quality Score.
How this Citation Auditor Works
We scrape all external links from your page and perform a "Head Request" to check their health status (200 OK vs 404 Not Found). We also compare the domains against a known list of high-authority sites (.edu, .gov, major news).
- Link Rot Detection: We find links that used to work but are now dead.
- Authority Matching: We award points for citing sources that Google and AI models already trust.
- Citation Ratio: We check if you are citing enough sources to back up your claims.
Why it Matters for GEO
Trust Signal
Citations are the currency of trust. If an article makes claims without linking to a source, it's hallucination-prone. Citing sources tells the AI "I verified this".
Bad Neighborhoods
Linking to broken pages (404s) or spam sites hurts your own reputation. It's like vouching for a criminal. Keep your outgoing link profile clean.
Davide Agostini
Android Mobile Engineer and Founder of ViaMetric. Davide specializes in technical SEO and the emerging field of Generative Engine Optimization (GEO), helping founders navigate the shift from links to AI citations.
Frequently Asked Questions
Yes, but the 'Authority Score' focuses mainly on external citations. Internal broken links are still flagged as errors because they ruin user experience.
There's no magic number, but a good rule of thumb for GEO is 1 citation per 300 words of factual content. Opinion pieces need fewer; research pieces need more.
Don't worry. Linking to high-quality relevant content (even competitors) shows you are part of the ecosystem. It's better than linking to low-quality spam or nothing at all.