Kuroma
External Citations & References
What this check reads on your page
Links that leave your site are counted by comparing each link's registrable domain with the page's own, so absolute internal links are never mistaken for citations and a protocol-relative link to another site still counts. The visible text, footer included, is scanned for citation phrasing in English, Traditional Chinese, Japanese and Korean, such as 'according to', 'research shows', 根據 or によると, plus bracketed reference numbers and years in parentheses. The check looks for a references or sources section by class or id, and counts the statistics on the page: percentages, thousands-separated figures and dollar amounts.
Our verdict on the evidence
Deliberately down-weighted Citing sources helps in controlled sandboxes but the effect shrinks toward zero in competitive replications, so claims are capped and the weight stays modest within the category.
GEO: Generative Engine Optimization (arXiv 2311.09735)
The check counts links and phrasing, so it cannot tell a good source from a bad one: a link to a press release and a link to a peer-reviewed paper score the same, and a source named in words without a link is credited on the phrase alone. What the number tells you is whether a claim on the page can be traced at all. An engine assembling an answer with attributions has a name and a URL to attach to yours; a claim that traces to nothing is easier for it to drop than to repeat.
What it is worth
36% of Authority Signals, which is 9 points of the overall 100.
How audited pages score on it
Based on 30,738 audited pages.
The median page scores 35, and the middle half of pages score between 25 and 43.
- Good (75 to 100)179 (1%)
- Moderate (50 to 74)5,166 (17%)
- Needs work (25 to 49)18,226 (59%)
- Critical (0 to 24)7,167 (23%)
83% of audited pages score below 50 on it.
Where it fails most and least
Industries that fail it most
- Passenger Transport / Transit: 95% of 138 audited pages fail it
- Manufacturing / Industrial: 93% of 2,970 audited pages fail it
- Gaming: 91% of 817 audited pages fail it
- Streaming / Video: 91% of 756 audited pages fail it
- Food & Beverage / CPG: 89% of 1,804 audited pages fail it
Industries that fail it least
- E-commerce Platform: 52% of 154 audited pages fail it
- MarTech / Marketing Platform: 53% of 201 audited pages fail it
- Cybersecurity: 56% of 108 audited pages fail it
- Digital Health / Health Tech: 59% of 128 audited pages fail it
- Retail Tech / POS: 61% of 100 audited pages fail it
How to fix it
- Link each claim to its source on another site; five outbound links fill that tier.
- Name the source in the sentence: 'according to', 'a 2025 survey found', or a numbered reference in brackets.
- Add a references or sources section at the end of the page, with a class or id that says so.
- Quote the figure from the source as a percentage, a thousands-separated count or a dollar amount, rather than paraphrasing it.