Answer capsules: why AI cites some sections and skips others — a free checker

An AI engine doesn’t read your page top to bottom. Its RAG pipeline splits it into chunks by heading, and the section that makes it into the answer is the one that stands on its own — no “as mentioned above”. That self-contained first paragraph of ~40–75 words is what we call an answer capsule, and there’s a free tool for it: the answer-capsule checker.

What the checker scores

Paste an article (or a URL — the text loads itself), and for every H2/H3 section the checker returns a verdict: capsule present (✓), short but punchy (≈), no capsule (✗) — plus an overall “capsule adherence” percentage. Everything runs in your browser, $0, without sending your text to a server. Every failure comes with one of four reasons:

• section opens with a list — a list needs an answer paragraph in front; on its own it doesn’t get cited;
• opens with filler — “in this section we’ll cover…” instead of the answer;
• answer buried — the first paragraph runs over 75 words, so it can’t be lifted whole;
• unbound reference — “this works like…” (what is “this”? the chunk is out of context — a pointer to nowhere).

We ran it on our own articles — 44%

The honest self-test: our guide What is GEO scored 44% (4 capsules out of 9 sections), and the zero-click article — 50% (3 of 6). We write about GEO daily — and still half our sections open with a list or bury the answer in an 80-word paragraph. Both articles went straight into the capsule-refactor queue.

This post, by the way, is written in capsules — paste its URL into the checker and see.

How to fix a section without a capsule

The fix is one paragraph: put a direct answer to the heading’s question — 40–75 words, no references to neighbouring sections — before the list or table. A real example from our own guide, where the “How GEO differs from SEO” section opened straight with a list:

Before: ## How GEO differs from SEO → a five-item list, immediately.

After: same heading → a paragraph: “GEO optimizes not your ranking but the probability of entering the AI answer itself: SEO fights for the blue-link click, GEO for the engine quoting your paragraph and naming your brand. The metrics change (citation share instead of positions), and so does the unit of work — a section, not a page” → and only then the list.

When the checker isn’t enough

The checker shows WHERE capsules are missing — it doesn’t write them for you. That’s what the AEO Content Pack ($49) is for: given a URL, it generates a capsule draft for each of your H2s, ready-to-paste FAQPage JSON-LD and a starter llms.txt — you edit and ship. And the full citability picture of a page — from capsules to markup to speed — comes from the paid GEO/SEO audit.

→ Check your article’s capsules