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Future of Advertising
Writing content that gets cited
A passage gets quoted when it says something specific that can be checked. Almost all business writing fails on both counts.
Key points
- Specificity is the citation mechanism; general statements are never quoted.
- One question per section, answered in the first sentence.
- Your own data is the most citable material you can produce.
Content gets cited when it contains something specific enough to be worth quoting and clear enough to be extracted without its surroundings.
The structure of a citable passage
Heading as a question. First sentence as the direct answer. Second and third sentences as the specifics, with numbers. Fourth as the qualification.
That structure is unnatural to write and is exactly what gets extracted, by generated answers, by featured snippets, and by human readers skimming.
The test: cut any four consecutive sentences out of your article and read them alone. If they still say something specific and true, that passage is citable.
Specificity, concretely
| Not citable | Citable |
|---|---|
| Costs vary depending on requirements | £340 to £520 for a standard installation in this region |
| The process takes some time | 4 to 6 hours on site, plus 2 weeks for parts |
| Many businesses find this useful | 34 of the 51 firms we surveyed use it weekly |
| Quality is important | failures cluster at the 8 to 12 year point |
| Regulations have changed | the threshold moved from 100 to 50 in January 2026 |
Every entry in the right column can be quoted. Nothing in the left column can.
Publish your own data
The single most citable asset a business can produce is a number nobody else has.
Every business holds data: average project cost, typical lead time, failure rates, seasonal demand patterns, the distribution of enquiry types. Published with the sample size and the method, that data is quoted, linked and referred to for years.
A survey of your own customers, or an analysis of your own completed projects, is cheap to produce and is the strongest content most businesses never make.
Date everything
Systems weight recency. Content with a visible date, and a genuine update history, is preferred over undated content.
That means: publish date and last-updated date visible, actual updates rather than a changed date, and removal or revision of content that has become wrong.
Name the author
Attribution to a named person with evident relevant experience is weighted positively and is the norm in journalism for good reason.
An author with a real biography, real credentials, and other content under the same name is a stronger signal than a company byline.
What never gets cited
Marketing copy. Pages describing how committed the company is. Content that restates common knowledge without adding a figure. Anything requiring three paragraphs of context before it says something.
The practical exercise
Take your most important page. Find every sentence containing a number, a date, a name or a measurable claim. If there are fewer than five, the page is not citable, and adding those five is a morning's work.
Frequently asked questions
How long should a citable passage be?
Two to four sentences that stand alone. If it needs the paragraph above to make sense, it will not be extracted.
What is the single most citable thing to publish?
Original data. Numbers nobody else has are quoted, linked and referenced for years.
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