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Free check · 6 items · live rescoring

Does your backlog score survive contact with citation data?

Enter one backlog row and this runs both scores side by side: the legacy volume-and-difficulty score, and the citation-aware one. If the multiplier is constant across your set, the new score is doing no work.

6 items Both scores computed live Citation curve shown No email

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The Backlog Rescoring Check

Score the backlog as it is prioritised today. Then enter one real row below — ideally your top-priority item.

Item 1

Can you produce, for every backlog item, its current rank as well as its volume and difficulty?

No rank input means no citation-aware score is possible at all.

Item 2

Have you scored the backlog twice — legacy, then citation-aware — and compared the two orderings?

The comparison is the test. Two scores that produce one ordering are one score.

Item 3

Is the target position on each item one the team can plausibly reach this quarter?

Or is it position 2 on every row? An aspirational target flatters the work least likely to pay.

Item 4

Does each ticket carry its projected citation-point delta alongside its current and target position?

The delta is what makes the score legible to someone outside SEO.

Item 5

Is your evaluation gate set later than your release cadence — 45 days rather than 14 or 30?

Shipping fortnightly and judging fortnightly guarantees you judge inside the lag.

Item 6

Do you have an alert that fires when a keyword slips out of the top two, routed to the same queue as a production defect?

The drop from position 2 to 3 is the largest single fall on the curve.

Score one backlog row

One real row from your backlog. The tool runs both scoring functions on it and shows where it sits on the citation curve.

Your result
Read the method
What you are being scored against

Our own numbers, and the published rank-to-citation curve

The curve below is the one our own scoring runs on: position 1 cites at 58%, position 2 at 54%, position 3 at 35%, position 10 at 14%, and everything from 11 down is capped at 14%. The cliff between position 2 and position 3 is the largest single drop on it.

MeasuredWhat it is
median 6.81 days, P90 37.10 daysHow long citations lag publicationThis is the reason a 45-day evaluation window beats a 30-day one: at 30 days you are reading the lag, not the result. Third-party measurement, not ours — and we hold it second-hand, so treat it as directional. · Profound, 2026, as reported in LinkedIn's 2026 AI Search Visibility guide
14 of 17Top-10 pages with zero AI citationsOur own estate: 17 pages ranked in Google's top 10 (average position 10 or better), and 3 of them were cited by an AI engine. · Indexable, 7 September 2026, n = 223 pages

The curve is calibrated to published research (AirOps and Growth Memo, 2026), not to your estate. The scores it produces are a prioritisation aid, not a forecast — and a constant multiplier across your set means the new score is not reordering anything.

A score nobody downstream can read changes nothing

The rescoring is arithmetic. Getting the citation-point delta onto the ticket, and the 45-day gate into the release process, is the part that takes a conversation.

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