Primary source citations

What this check measures

The numeric statements in your main content (percentages, totals, ratios, money amounts used as facts) and the links that sit inside your paragraphs. We sort those links into primary sources (government, standards bodies, official documentation and your industry's own authorities), other sites, and links that are never citations (social profiles, review and booking sites, your own pages, affiliate links). Navigation and footer links never count.

Why it matters

Google's helpful-content guidance lists "clear sourcing" first among the things that make content trustworthy. Bing's guidelines say URLs are more likely to be selected for citations when content stands on its own and its facts are explicit and can be verified independently. A 2024 benchmark study (GEO, KDD 2024) found that adding citations, quotations and statistics was among the strategies that raised a source's visibility in generative engine answers, by up to 40 percent on its benchmark. That is a lab result on one benchmark, not a promise about live engines.

How we score it

Editorial. A page with no statistics passes. A page whose statistics have no primary or industry source lowers the foundational pillar at low severity, or medium for law, accounting and funding sites. Medical pages stay low, because the clinical citation review covers medical claims.

Confidence-flag rules

MEDIUM: links and their positions are read exactly; recognizing a sentence as a statistic is a text reading.

Common mistakes

• Stating "9 out of 10 clients" or "40% savings" with no source.
• Citing a news article or a blog that repeats a number instead of the study or agency behind it.
• Putting all sources in a footer list instead of next to the claim.

How to fix it

Link each statistic to its original source in the same paragraph, preferring the agency, regulator, standards body or study over an article that repeats it, and say what year the number is from.

Primary sources

• Creating helpful, reliable, people-first content (last updated 2026-10-05, accessed 2026-10-07)

  Google Search Central

• Bing Webmaster Guidelines, sections 15 (verified independently) and 16 (entities defined clearly and consistently) (no date shown on the page, accessed 2026-10-07)

  Microsoft Bing

• Aggarwal et al., GEO: Generative Engine Optimization, KDD 2024, arXiv 2311.09735 v3 (2024-06-28, a benchmark study, accessed 2026-10-07)

  arXiv

Changelog

• 2026-10-07 · New. Replaces outbound link quality, which counted every external link on the page (social icons included) against a fixed list. Only links inside your content count now, and phone numbers, dates and addresses are never read as statistics.