About citability
Why I built a tool to measure what Ahrefs and Semrush will never see: whether AI systems can find you, recommend you, and cite you.
Who
I'm Chudi Nnorukam, an AI-Visible Web Architect. For 8+ years, I've built systems that help websites rank in traditional search. But starting in 2024, I noticed something that nobody was talking about: the explosion of AI search changed the ranking game overnight.
ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, and hundreds of smaller AI research assistants are now the first place millions of people look for answers. They don't use Google's ranking algorithm. They don't respect robots.txt. They have their own crawlers, their own indexing rules, and their own citation preferences.
And almost nobody is measuring whether AI systems can find them.
What
I built citability.dev to measure that gap. The platform runs 10 verified infrastructure checks, each backed by official documentation from OpenAI, Anthropic, Perplexity, and the AI Improvement Program (aiip.dev).
The checks cover:
- llms.txt – Can AI systems find your AI metadata?
- ai.txt – Is your AI opt-in policy declared?
- .well-known/ai.json – Can AI crawlers parse your structured metadata?
- Schema.org markup – Is your content tagged for AI understanding?
- Crawlability – Can AI bots actually reach your content?
- Citation infrastructure – When AI systems mention you, are URLs properly formatted?
Each check returns a pass/fail plus a link to the official spec. No guessing. No vague best practices.
Why
"I built citability.dev because I noticed a gap: companies invest heavily in SEO but have zero infrastructure for AI search. Traditional SEO tools measure Google rankings. They don't measure whether ChatGPT, Perplexity, or Claude can find you."
In January 2024, I started seeing companies panic about AI. They asked: "Will ChatGPT cite us?" "Can Claude find our documentation?" "How do we get mentioned in Perplexity results?"
The answer was always: we don't know. Ahrefs can't measure it. Semrush can't measure it. Google Search Console doesn't show it. And there was no framework to diagnose the problem.
So I built one. I studied how Claude, ChatGPT, and Perplexity crawl the web. I read the official documentation. I tested what works and what doesn't. And I codified it into 10 checks that anyone can run against their website.
Open Source
The AI Visibility Readiness (AVR) Framework is fully open source and available on GitHub under the Apache 2.0 license. The code powers every scan on citability.dev.
If you want to run audits on your own infrastructure, integrate with your CI/CD pipeline, or fork and extend the framework, everything is available. No lock-in. No proprietary black box.
View on GitHub