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Citations

concept

Every answer carries citations to the approved sources it was generated from.

A Citation is a source reference attached to an answer. Every answer the assistant gives is generated only from the approved Corpus sources behind it, and each answer carries Citations back to those exact sources so a reader can verify where a claim came from.

What a Citation is

In the Widget, Citations appear as inline pills woven into the answer text — small numbered markers next to the sentence they support. Tapping a pill opens a preview of the underlying source, including the page or section it was drawn from. Citations are part of the answer itself, not a footnote appended afterward: if the assistant states something, the pill shows you the approved document it stands on.

Citations are content, not decoration — Use the term "Citation" throughout VeriCite — never "source link", "footnote", or "reference". A Citation ties one statement to one approved source so trust is verifiable, not assumed.

Why it matters

Citations are how VeriCite keeps answers honest. Because every answer is grounded in your approved Corpus, the assistant can only say what your sources support — and the Citation pills prove it. When sources cover a question, you get a cited answer. When they do not, VeriCite escalates to a human instead of guessing. Citations and escalation are two halves of the same promise: an answer is either backed by an approved source or it is handed to a person.

How it relates to other concepts

A Citation always points at an approved Corpus source — the document an assistant is allowed to read and cite. The Corpus is the pool of approved material; a Citation is the thread from one answer back into that pool. When the Corpus is silent on a question, no Citation can be formed, which is exactly the condition that triggers Escalation by default. Reading the Corpus and Escalation concepts together gives you the full picture of when VeriCite answers and when it stops.

The pipeline is platform-managed

Turning approved sources into something an assistant can cite happens entirely on the platform. VeriCite splits each approved document into overlapping chunks, converts those chunks into embeddings, and uses a managed reranker to surface the most relevant passages for a given question. None of this is tenant-editable: there is no admin UI for these mechanics, and the values are fixed for every workspace.

Chunk size800 chars

Approved documents are split into 800-character chunks. Fixed for all workspaces; no tenant knob.

Chunk overlap150 chars

Adjacent chunks overlap by 150 characters so context isn't lost at boundaries. Fixed; not configurable.

Embedding dimension768

Each chunk is embedded into a 768-dimension vector. The dimension is hard-fixed across the platform.

Rerankerplatform-managed

A managed reranker orders candidate passages by relevance. Enabled and tuned by the platform, not by your workspace.

Limitations

"Citation rate" on Home is a proxy, not a coverage metric — The Citation rate KPI shown on the Home dashboard is computed as 100 − unansweredRate × 100 — it is the inverse of the unanswered rate, not a measured count of how many answers carried Citations. Treat it as a rough health signal only. It appears on Home alone; it is not part of Analytics or Accuracy, and you should not read it as verified citation coverage.

Likewise, because the chunking, embedding, and reranking pipeline is platform-managed, there are no per-workspace controls to tune retrieval. If answers are missing Citations you expect, the lever is your approved Corpus — what is uploaded and approved — not the pipeline settings.

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