Why every answer cites a source

Under every answer Karas gives, there are links to the help-centre articles it answered from. They are not decoration, and they are not optional.

What the citations are

Each citation is one article from your documentation that contributed to the answer. They are deduplicated and titled, so three passages from the same article appear as one link rather than three. Clicking one opens your article.

Why they are there

For your customer. An answer they can verify is an answer they can act on. Customers who can see the source article read it, and often solve the next problem themselves.

For your team. When an answer is wrong, the citation tells you immediately whether the problem was retrieval — it found the wrong article — or the article itself. That distinction normally takes a support lead an afternoon to work out. See Diagnosing a wrong answer.

For the design. An answer that cannot be traced to a source is treated as a failure rather than a result. If Karas writes something substantive and has no citation to attach to it, the answer is withheld instead of delivered.

Why the answer text looks tidier than the raw output

The assistant's raw answer tends to end with a paragraph of links and to leave internal reference markers in the prose. The widget removes both before display, because the citation links below the answer already carry the same articles, titled and deduplicated. The answer you read ends with a short line pointing at those links.

This is a display decision. The underlying answer and its sources are unchanged, which is why an answer fetched through the API looks slightly different from the same answer in the widget.

What a missing citation means

If you see an answer with no citations, it is one of two things: a greeting or other trivial exchange, which needs none; or a message telling the visitor that the question cannot be answered from your documentation, which has no source to cite because nothing sufficient was found.