AI citation readiness
AI citation readiness is the condition in which a source, page, passage, entity or claim is accessible, retrievable, extractable, citable and governable by AI-mediated answer systems.
It is a readiness concept, not a guarantee. A ready source is easier to discover, segment, cite and verify, but external systems may still ignore it, substitute another source, use it ornamentally, or generate an answer that fails proof of fidelity.
Short definition
AI citation readiness combines five requirements: access to the useful surface, retrieval across the visible query and adjacent fan-out questions, extractable passages that preserve local meaning, clear citation support for the relevant claim, and a source hierarchy strong enough to keep the citation inside its authority boundary.
What it is not
It is not SEO ranking, AI visibility, citability or AI citation tracking alone. Those layers may produce signals, but none of them proves that the final answer was legitimate.
Governance implication
The correct test is not merely whether a source can be cited. It is whether the right source governs the right claim under the right scope. For the applied hub, read AI citation readiness and interpretive governance.