Retrievability

Retrievability is the likelihood that a given piece of content gets surfaced at all during an AI system's initial document search, the step before any citation or answer-inclusion decision is made, meaning content can be well-written and still have low retrievability.

Why it matters

Retrievability is a precondition, not a guarantee: a passage with high retrievability still has to clear citation-worthiness scoring and other downstream filters, but a passage that never gets retrieved has zero chance of citation regardless of how well-optimized the rest of the page is.

Related terms

• Passage Retrieval

  Passage retrieval is the step where an AI system selects specific relevant text chunks, not entire pages, to build its answer, meaning a page can be retrieved for one passage while the rest of it never enters the AI system's consideration for that query at all.

• Citation-Worthiness Scoring

  Citation-worthiness scoring is a secondary filtering layer some AI engines apply to already-retrieved results, beyond standard search ranking, to decide which sources actually earn a citation in the final answer. A page can rank well and still get retrieved without ever being judged citation-worthy enough to appear in the answer itself.

• Extractability

  Extractability is how cleanly a chunk of content can be lifted and reused by an AI system without needing surrounding context to remain accurate or coherent, functioning as a practical measure of whether a passage would still make sense if it were the only thing quoted.