Problem
People need to judge the sources behind an answer without opening every citation in the text.
Solution
List the sources used for the answer, with a title, publisher or domain, and date where available. Link to each source and show known access restrictions before people open it.
Place the list where it supports the task. A compact preview near the answer can help readers assess factual information; a longer list can sit below it or behind an expansion control.
Distinguish sources used in the answer from other search results. Do not imply that every retrieved page supports the response. Keep the visible list short enough to scan, with the rest available on request.
Use when
An answer uses information retrieved from websites, files, or an internal collection.
Don’t use when
The answer is generated from the viewer’s own supplied text or from the model’s parameters alone. A list of sources under a rewrite of the viewer’s paragraph is theatre.
Trade-offs
Detailed source lists take space and can delay the answer people came for. A long list may look more convincing without providing stronger evidence. Inaccessible sources limit what readers can verify.
Checklist
- Is the list visible before the answer is read, or only after?
- Does each row carry a domain and a date without a click?
- Can the reader tell what was retrieved against what was actually used?
- Are paywalled, dead, and permission-restricted sources marked before the click?
- How many rows show before an expander, and what’s the ordering?
- Does the ordering reflect how much each source contributed, or arrival order?
- What does the list look like when retrieval returned nothing good?
- Does the answer say when it went beyond its sources?
- Is the list included when the answer is copied or shared?
- Do the rows survive a narrow viewport without truncating the domain?
Compare
Perplexity puts the sources above the prose as a horizontal strip and treats them as the primary object. The answer reads as a synthesis of a visible corpus rather than an opinion with footnotes. ChatGPT attaches sources when a search ran and keeps them subordinate to the answer, preserving the assistant framing at the cost of later calibration. Claude surfaces project knowledge and attached documents as the basis, so the list describes a corpus the viewer assembled rather than one the system found. Microsoft Copilot lists internal files from the tenant, where a row’s real information is often whether the reader can open it at all.
Related
Citation chip links a particular claim to a source. Tool call trace records the search or lookup. Attachment tray contains files supplied by the user.
Scoped context defines where the assistant can look. Reasoning disclosure summarizes its approach to the task.