Why Can't an AI Assistant Quote Your Website Paragraph?
An AI assistant cannot safely quote a website paragraph when it fails Dr. Jonah Tebaa's concept of the liftable paragraph by relying on its surrounding page. In Tebaa's analysis, passages get passed over if they contain unowned pronouns like we, undefined claims, or pointers like see below. Using a hypothetical freight forwarder example, Tebaa outlines five editing checks: naming the subject, defining the scope, placing conditions beside claims, dating changing terms, and removing page pointers.
Open almost any company website and you will find a paragraph like this one, a composite written for illustration: "We provide tailored solutions designed around your needs. Our team brings years of experience, and, as described above, this approach delivers reliable results." To a visitor who has just read the page, it feels perfectly clear. To an AI assistant that lifts the paragraph out and reads it alone, it says almost nothing.
Dr. Jonah Tebaa's answer to this problem is what he calls the liftable paragraph. His argument is that the paragraph, not the page, is the smallest unit of visibility in AI-generated answers. A passage that depends on its neighbours cannot be reused without them, so a page can be excellent for human readers and still offer an answer engine nothing it can safely quote.
Why dependent words matter
In his work with marketing teams, Dr. Tebaa points to three kinds of dependent wording. The first is the unowned pronoun or label: "we", "our team", "this approach", "the solution". The second is the pointer to elsewhere on the page: "as described above" or "see below". The third is the claim without edges, such as "clients across the region", where neither the client nor the region is defined.
Readers repair these gaps without noticing, because they remember the headline they read a moment ago. A lifted passage carries no such memory. Dr. Tebaa is careful about the limit of the claim: how any given assistant selects passages differs between products and changes over time, and rewriting does not guarantee a quotation. His point is narrower. A paragraph that cannot stand alone gives itself a reason to be passed over, and that reason is cheap to remove.
The worked example he uses
To make the idea concrete, Dr. Tebaa works through a hypothetical freight forwarder in Beirut. The firm and its figures are invented for the exercise. The weak version promises "comprehensive logistics solutions" and says rates "vary". The rewritten version names the company, states that it handles sea-freight imports for businesses in Lebanon, gives an illustrative clearance time for a standard container with complete documents, notes that missing paperwork extends it, carries a review date, and lists what drives a quote: container size, cargo type and storage time.
The rewrite is only a sentence or two longer. In his view it also serves a human customer better, since a buyer learns more from the second version than from the first.
The five checks
Dr. Tebaa condenses the method into five editing checks that a marketing team can apply without developer help:
- Name the subject in the sentence rather than relying on "we".
- Give each claim one scope: who it covers and where.
- Place the condition beside the claim it qualifies.
- Date or version anything that changes, such as prices, hours and terms.
- Remove every pointer to somewhere else on the page.
He stresses that these are ordinary editorial choices. They do not require a new content system or a technical audit.
Starting small
Dr. Tebaa advises against rewriting an entire site. In his approach, a team chooses the three pages a stranger is most likely to land on first and takes the single most important paragraph from each. Then comes what he calls a cold-reader test: the paragraph is pasted alone into a blank document and shown to someone who has never seen the website. If that person cannot say who is speaking, what is claimed and for whom, the paragraph still depends on its page.
He also notes that the exercise sometimes exposes a deeper issue. When a team struggles to rewrite a paragraph, the underlying claim often was never fully settled, and the rewrite becomes the first time the company has had to state exactly what it does and under what terms. For Dr. Tebaa, that clarity is worth having regardless of how any assistant behaves, which is why he frames the work as an afternoon of editing and not a campaign.
The full argument, including the annotated before-and-after paragraphs and the practical checklist, is set out in Dr. Tebaa's article The Paragraph an AI Assistant Can Quote Without You on jonahtebaa.com.
Related evidence: The paper introduces Generative Engine Optimization as a framework intended to help content creators improve how visible their content is in the responses generated by generative search engines. (the arXiv paper introducing Generative Engine Optimization)
Google's Search Central documentation states that there are no additional requirements, and no special optimizations, needed for a page to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode beyond the existing SEO fundamentals. (Google Search Central guidance on AI features)
