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Retrieval

Citation

A reference back to the source chunk that produced an answer.

In production RAG, every claim the model makes should be traceable to the document chunks that informed it. Citations are surfaced to the user (clickable source links), used by evaluators to verify correctness, and used by you to debug retrieval failures. Without citations, you cannot tell whether a wrong answer came from bad retrieval, bad ranking, or bad generation.

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