Writing so answer engines can quote you

What quotability actually means

A search result snippet, a featured answer and a conversational answer engine all do the same underlying thing: they find a passage that answers the question and present it separately from the page it came from. Whether your writing survives that separation is the whole of the matter.

Most clinic writing does not survive it, for a simple reason. It is written assuming the reader has read the preceding paragraphs, which is a reasonable assumption for a book and a poor one for a page arrived at from a search.

Six liftable constructions

• A question as a heading. Phrased as it is asked, not as a topic.
• The answer immediately beneath it, in one or two sentences, complete.
• One idea per paragraph. A paragraph carrying three ideas cannot be quoted for any of them.
• Specific nouns rather than pronouns. "The treatment" rather than "it", at least at the start of a passage.
• Definitions that stand alone. A sentence that would make sense read out to somebody who had not seen the page.
• Lists with the item first. "Bruising: common, settles within about a week" rather than a sentence that reaches the point at the end.

Six that are not

• Answers beginning "it depends" and never saying what on.
• Preamble. Three paragraphs of context before the point.
• Back-references. "As we mentioned above" makes the passage dependent.
• Claims with no subject. "Results are excellent" cannot be quoted because it does not say what about what.
• Text inside an image. Not readable, not quotable, and not accessible either, as Module 24, Accessibility as an obligation and an advantage explains.
• Headings that are slogans. A heading nobody would type is a heading nothing can match.

The extraction test

Take any page. Copy each H2 and the two sentences beneath it into a blank document, with nothing else. Read the result. Every pair should make sense on its own and should answer the question in its heading.

The pairs that fail are the sections to rewrite, and they usually fail in one of two ways: the heading is a topic rather than a question, or the first two sentences are context rather than answer. Both are fixed by moving the answer up and rewriting the heading as the question it answers.

If a passage needs the page around it to make sense, it will never be quoted, and a reader who lands on it mid-page will not understand it either.

What this is not

It is not a set of tricks for a new kind of engine, and treating it as one leads to writing that is worse for readers and no better for machines. Google's guidance on snippets is explicit that the way to influence what is shown is to write better passages, not to configure anything.

Nor is it a licence to write in fragments. A page composed entirely of two-sentence answers with no reasoning is thin, and reasoning is what makes a clinic's page worth more than a general reference. The structure is answer first, reasoning after, as Module 16, The answer page pattern sets out. The reasoning is not optional; it simply comes second.

Attribution and why it matters to a clinic

When an answer engine quotes a passage it may attribute it, and attribution is the practical value of this work for a clinic. Being named as the source of the answer to a question a patient just asked is a form of visibility that no amount of paid placement produces.

Two things make attribution more likely and both are within your control. Clear authorship, with a named person and a role rather than an anonymous clinic voice, and a page whose subject is unambiguous, which is what the structured data in Module 14, Structured data for treatment pages establishes. Neither is a guarantee, and any source promising one is selling something.