The citability signature is the learned set of signals that distinguish cited from not-cited sources for a given query type. It's what powers the source-gap report.
What the signature weighs
For every scraped source page and passage, CitedOS scores a range of signals derived from how the engines tend to rank and select — grouped into a few families:
- On-page extractability & structure — how cleanly an answer can be lifted from the page: semantic structure, concise answer passages, and machine-readable markup.
- Specificity & freshness — how fact-dense, specific, and recently-dated the content is.
- Query–answer match — how well the passage actually answers the (sub-)query it was retrieved for, scored semantically.
- Off-site authority signals — the source type and reputation signals that decide whether a page is even in the retrieval pool.
Cited vs not-cited, same query
The signature isn't "what do cited pages look like" in the abstract. CitedOS compares cited against not-cited sources that appeared for the same query — sources fighting over the same retrieval pool. Controlling for the query is what isolates the features that actually move the citation decision.
The output is a signature summary for your category — what the cited sources have in common — that feeds directly into the gap report and playbook.