Citation Formatter for GEO

Your statistics need a source readers can check

A number with no origin reads like a guess. When you quote a study or a survey, the reader should be able to see who said it, where, and when. This formatter saves you from rebuilding that attribution by hand. Give it the source details once and it produces four variants: an "According to" sentence, a stat followed by its source in parentheses, a reference entry, and an HTML snippet built from a blockquote and a cite element. It runs locally and verifies nothing.

Step by step

1. Fill Source Title with the study or article name.
2. List the people in Author(s), and the publication year in Year.
3. Name the outlet or organization in Publication/Source.
4. Paste the link into URL (if applicable).
5. Put the figure or sentence you are borrowing into Key Finding/Quote.
6. Press Format Citation, then Copy, and delete the variants you will not use.

What to watch for

The "According to" sentence puts your finding between quote marks, and the HTML variant places it inside a blockquote. Both signal a verbatim quote, which is wrong for a summary, so when you have reworded the source, drop the marks and turn the blockquote into an ordinary paragraph.

The fourth variant, headed HTML, is plain markup with no structured data. Special characters such as & and double quotes are converted to entities for you, so a title containing them will not break the code. If the URL box is empty, the source name is printed without a link and the blockquote's cite attribute is left blank, so you may want to delete that attribute.

Missing inputs are filled with defaults rather than flagged. With no author, the sentence starts "According to research"; with no source, the stat version falls back to the title. The copy button grabs every variant plus the section headers.

Questions people ask

Is this APA or MLA format?

Neither exactly. The reference entry follows a loose author, year, title, publisher order, but it keeps names as you typed them. For academic work, follow a style guide.

Will formatting citations this way get me cited by ChatGPT or Google AI?

Nobody can promise that. Clear attribution is still worth doing because people can verify your numbers, and Google's helpful content questions ask whether a page makes you want to trust it, for example through clear sourcing.

Does the tool check that the source is real?

No. It only rearranges what you type. Open the original yourself and confirm the figure, the year and the wording before you publish.

Further reading: How Perplexity, ChatGPT, and Google AI Pick Their Sources and E-E-A-T: What It Is and How to Demonstrate It.

The same tool is also published on the static mirror at seoprocheck.github.io, and the rest of the set is on the free tools page.