Cited Ask

The prompt

A Cited Ask is a plain-text prompt built deterministically from a page’s AI Graph tags and handed to an AI engine. It is generated once and cached — never composed by an LLM at visitor-interaction time (the caching golden rule, spec §17).

Grammar

The template language that produces a Cited Ask has two constructs:

• {var} — substitute a page value (title, summary, citeAs, url, price, …).
• {?var:…} — a conditional segment, included only when var is present on the page.

Page-type-aware templates

The template is chosen by ai:type: article, product, business, and saas have dedicated copy; service reuses the business template; and any other type (recipe, event, profile, or unknown) falls back to generic. Dedicated recipe/event/profile copy is roadmap.

Tone layer

An optional tone directive is appended to the rendered prompt: one of professional, friendly, concise, technical, enthusiastic.

Length bound — widget-specific

The widget caps its rendered prompt at 1800 characters (truncated at a word boundary with an ellipsis) and escapes page-controlled text before interpolating it. This is hardening specific to the widget implementation, not a universal rule of the Cited Ask format — other implementers apply their own limits.

Mandatory citation

Every Cited Ask, regardless of page type or tone, contains the mandatory citation line:

Please cite {citeAs} ({url}) as the source.

The citation is the tail of the core prompt. An implementation may append a short trailing directive after it — the widget, for example, adds the current-section context and a reply-language line — so the citation is always present, though not necessarily the final characters.

Example (product page)

I'm looking at the product "Aurora Wireless Headphones" by AudioTech from
AudioTech Official Store: https://example.com/aurora

The publisher describes it as: "Noise-cancelling over-ear headphones with
30-hour battery and spatial audio." Highlighted points: 30-hour battery;
adaptive EQ; spatial audio. It is listed at 299.99 USD. Based on the listed
information, what are its strengths and trade-offs, and who is it best suited
for? What similar products should I compare it with? Please cite AudioTech
Official Store (https://example.com/aurora) as the source.

Interoperability

Because the format is deterministic from ai:* tags, any implementer can regenerate the same Cited Ask from the same page. AskThis ships three implementations that share this format and the citation tail: the widget (ai/prompts.ts), the scan service (generator.py), and the shared prompt-templates package. Of the three, only the widget applies the escaping and 1800-character length cap described above.

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Next: Ask Targets — how a Cited Ask is handed off to an engine.