Answerability comes from writing passages an engine can retrieve and quote on their own. Five changes do most of the work.
- Lead with the answer. Start the passage with a direct statement, not a wind up. If the question is what is X, the first sentence should say X is.
- Make each passage self contained. Name the subject inside the passage. Do not rely on the heading above it, because an engine may pull the passage without the heading.
- Give each answer a heading that matches the question. A heading phrased as the question it answers helps the passage be retrieved as a unit.
- Keep the key fact in one clean sentence. If an engine has to stitch three paragraphs together to answer, it usually will not.
- Cite your sources. A statistic with a named source or a link is one an engine can trust and repeat. An unsupported claim is one it tends to skip.
Do this for the reader, not the metric. Chopping a page into tiny headed blocks to game a score reads badly to a person, and engines will penalise that as they mature. The aim is genuine clarity, which happens to be exactly what an engine can lift.
Run Answerability in Topkay to see which passages already work and which need this treatment.