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Citable

Definition

Speakable

Also known as: SpeakableSpecification

Speakable is a schema.org property (with the SpeakableSpecification type) that identifies, by CSS selector or XPath, which parts of a page are best suited to be read aloud or quoted verbatim — typically a headline and a short summary. It was introduced for voice assistants and remains the most direct way to tell a machine which passage is the answer.

Google documents speakable as a beta feature for news publishers on Google Assistant, and it is not a confirmed ranking or citation signal for AI answer features. It is nonetheless cheap, harmless and precise: it points at the exact element that contains your direct answer.

Every guide on this site marks its short-answer block with data-speakable="short-answer" and references that selector from the TechArticle JSON-LD:

json
"speakable": {
  "@type": "SpeakableSpecification",
  "cssSelector": ["[data-speakable='short-answer']", "[data-speakable='headline']"]
}

Related terms

Guides that use this term

  • Structured data

    Structured data for AI answers: the schema.org types that matter

    Structured data for AI answers is JSON-LD that labels what a page contains: Article or TechArticle for provenance (author, datePublished, dateModified, citation), FAQPage for question–answer pairs, DefinedTerm for definitions, Person with sameAs for authors, BreadcrumbList and WebSite for context, and SpeakableSpecification for the direct answer. Google requires no markup for AI features; its value is removing ambiguity, so generate it from the CMS fields that render the visible text.

    9 min read