AI Visibility pillar / check clinical-citation-presence
Clinical citations to primary sources
On pages with clinical content, checks for links to primary medical sources such as NIH, CDC, FDA, PubMed, or peer-reviewed journals.
By Shimon Carroll, Founder, SEO for AI Agents · Last updated
What this check measures
We count clinical terms (diagnosis, treatment, medication, disease, and similar). With three or more, we look for links to primary sources: nih.gov (including PubMed), cdc.gov, who.int, fda.gov, medlineplus.gov, cancer.gov, major journals, and doi.org.
Why it matters
Google’s helpful content guidance asks whether content provides clear sourcing and evidence of expertise, and its rater guidelines hold medical information to the highest accuracy standard. Primary citations let a reader, and an AI answer, verify a clinical statement.
How we score it
A review prompt, not a legal verdict. Runs only on medical practice audits. When the cue is missing the finding is low severity at medium confidence, which lowers the ai visibility pillar by about 0.6 points. A pass is informational and never scores. Pages with fewer than three clinical terms are not evaluated. In that case the finding is marked not measured: it does not score and does not count toward coverage. Each finding names who should review it, quotes what we saw on the page, and cites the primary source. Where the page shows a US address we name the inferred state; otherwise the wording is state-agnostic.
Confidence-flag rules
MEDIUM: the check reads the visible page text, links, and JSON-LD directly, so what it quotes is exact, but wording can carry the same meaning in phrasing we do not recognise, and one page does not show the whole site.
Common mistakes
- Citing a commercial health blog instead of the study or guideline behind it.
- Statements that no longer match the current guideline they cite.
- Copying a citation format without a real source.
How to fix it
Link the guideline, agency page, or peer-reviewed study behind each clinical statement, and have a clinician confirm the statement still matches the source. Remove clinical claims you cannot source.
Primary sources
Changelog
- · New. This rule used to live only in the vertical configuration and never ran. It is now a registered review check with a cited primary source, framed as a prompt to review with a professional rather than a pass or fail legal verdict.