Answer-first passage

An answer-first passage is a self-contained block of text that states the answer to a question in its first sentence, then the specifics and the source, so a search engine or assistant can quote it on its own. It is the unit that featured snippets, AI Overviews and generated answers actually lift; the page ranks, but the passage gets quoted.

What makes a passage liftable

• A clear question above it, usually the heading.
• The answer first. Not the background, not “it depends”, the answer.
• Specifics next. Numbers, names, dates, conditions.
• A source for any claim a reader would want to check.
• Self-contained. It makes sense without the paragraph before it. Pronouns that point elsewhere (“this approach”) break it.

Example

Does blocking GPTBot remove a site from ChatGPT search? No. OpenAI documents GPTBot as its training crawler and OAI-SearchBot as the crawler for ChatGPT search; a robots.txt rule for one does not apply to the other (OpenAI crawler documentation).

That block answers, specifies, cites and stands alone. Our citability check lists each section of a page and quotes the passage that would be lifted, or shows why none qualifies.