What if the citation is wrong?

That is a retrieval failure worth investigating, and usually means the content is structured in a way that retrieves badly — often one page covering too many topics.

Do citations slow down answers?

No. The passages were retrieved in order to compose the answer, so the source is already known — showing it costs nothing.

Glossary

Citation

A citation converts an assertion into something checkable. That is the entire value.

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Why it matters

Without a source, every answer asks for trust it has not earned, and there is no way to distinguish a correct answer from a confident invention. Citations move verification from impossible to trivial.

Answers that must be believed or independently re-researched
No way to tell a good answer from a fluent wrong one
Readers unable to continue into the underlying material

What a real citation requires

It must point at the passage actually used to compose the answer. A link chosen afterwards because it looks topical is decoration, and it fails exactly when it matters — on the answer that was wrong.

It changes the reader's behaviour

A cited answer sends people into your documentation rather than away from it. That makes citations useful commercially as well as epistemically: readers land on the page they needed instead of leaving with a summary.

Use them to debug

When testing, check the citation rather than the answer. A right answer with a wrong citation means retrieval is failing and only luck produced a correct result.

Common questions

What if the citation is wrong?: That is a retrieval failure worth investigating, and usually means the content is structured in a way that retrieves badly — often one page covering too many topics.
Do citations slow down answers?: No. The passages were retrieved in order to compose the answer, so the source is already known — showing it costs nothing.