Why this is assessed as a writing problem
A great deal of commentary treats answer engines as a new channel requiring a new technique. Assessed calmly, most of what actually distinguishes quotable material from unquotable material is old and unglamorous: say something specific, say where it came from, do not contradict yourself, and put the answer near the top.
The reason is structural. A system producing an answer has to select a passage and represent it. Passages that state something definite can be represented. Passages that reassure cannot, because there is nothing in them to carry across. A page reading "our expert team uses the latest techniques to deliver outstanding results tailored to you" contains no proposition. It cannot be quoted because it does not say anything, and it also cannot be checked, which is the same property viewed from the other side.
This has a useful consequence for a clinic. Work done to make material quotable is work done to make it clearer for patients, and it does not depend on any prediction about which systems will exist next year. That is why this instrument scores properties of the writing rather than techniques aimed at a particular platform.
It also has an uncomfortable consequence. Making a claim quotable makes it checkable, and some claims on some clinic websites will not survive being made specific. That is not a defect of the instrument.
How to score this instrument
Choose five pages: the home page, two service pages, one page about the clinic, and one price or booking page. Score each criterion against those five, taking the weakest.
For the specificity criterion, read a page and underline every sentence that could be shown to be false. If you underline nothing, score 0. This test sounds crude and is remarkably discriminating.
For self-contained passages, take three section headings and read only the text beneath each. If a section cannot be understood alone, score it down. Systems that quote do not read your page in order.
For contradiction, list every price, duration, qualification and guarantee that appears more than once on the site and compare the instances. This is tedious, takes about twenty minutes, and finds something in most clinics.
For machine access, read your own robots file and ask whether its contents were chosen. A file inherited from a template is scored 0 even if its effect happens to be the one you want, because the criterion is about deliberateness. If you are unsure what the directives do, the robots documentation explains the format.
Common scoring errors
Scoring the addition of structured data as readiness. Markup describing a vague page is a precise description of vagueness. The writing criteria carry more weight here than the technical ones, and they are listed first for that reason.
Refreshing dates without reviewing content. Automatically updating a modified date is a signal that is not true. Score 0 on that criterion, since a false date is worse than no date.
Assuming the quotable summary must be short marketing copy. It should be the most informative sixty to ninety words on the page, which usually means it is the least promotional.
Treating a stated scope as a legal disclaimer. A scope statement says what the site is for and what it does not cover. A liability disclaimer says something different and does not satisfy the criterion.
Blocking every automated reader as a precaution. That is a legitimate position, and it is not readiness. Score it accurately against the criterion, which asks whether the choice was deliberate and documented.
What a good result actually buys you
It is worth being plain about the ceiling of this instrument. Scoring in the top band does not entitle a clinic to be cited by anything. Citation depends on systems whose selection behaviour is neither published nor stable, and any supplier presenting a guaranteed outcome in this area is describing something they cannot control.
What a good result does buy is narrower and real. If a system does read your material, it will find statements it can carry across accurately, dated, attributed and free of internal contradiction. The alternative is that it finds ambiguity and resolves it, and a resolution you did not write is a description of your clinic you did not write.
The second benefit is internal. Sites that score well here are easier for staff to use, because the answer to a patient question can be found rather than reconstructed. Several clinics have discovered that their own reception team was the heaviest user of the pages they wrote for search engines.
Once this instrument is scoring well, the useful next steps are the patient communication clarity rubric, which examines whether what you have written can be understood, and the local discoverability scorecard if you have not yet run it, since entity clarity depends on the record being consistent in the first place.