CITE Framework
Coin your concepts, Inline evidence, Triangulate structure, Establish entity: a four-step framework for making content citation-ready for AI answers. Attributed to Nicola Ziady, 2026.
The four steps
Coin your concepts: name the thing you are describing, so there is a term that leads back to you. Inline evidence: put the supporting data next to the claim rather than in a footnote. Triangulate structure: express the same facts in more than one form so retrieval can find them. Establish entity: make it unambiguous who is saying it.
The sequence works because each step addresses a different reason a model declines to quote you: no distinctive handle, no support, no retrievable form, no resolvable source.
Where the first step gets misused
Coining a concept is genuinely effective and easily abused. A named idea that describes something real gives a model a handle; a named idea invented purely to own a phrase adds noise to a field already full of it.
This A to Z contains examples of both, which is why every entry here records who coined a term, when, and how strong the evidence is. Confidence for this framework is recorded as medium.