AI answer citations & source transparency
When the AI answers a customer, it shows where the answer came from. Citations make AI answers auditable for customers and for your team.
What customers see
An AI answer includes its sources — typically as a short list of links to the articles or pages that grounded the answer:
Each citation shows the source title (article title or page name).
Selecting a citation opens the source — a help center article in the widget's Help view, or the linked page.
Citations appear only for sources actually used; if the AI answers without sources (for example, a direct clarification), no citation is shown.
Why citations matter
Trust — customers can verify answers instead of taking them on faith.
Deflection — a citation doubles as a "read more" link that resolves related questions without another message.
Transparency — customers understand the answer is grounded in your documentation, not invented.
What agents see
In the inbox, AI messages carry the same citation metadata. When reviewing an AI-handled or AI-resolved conversation, an agent can:
See which sources the AI used for each answer.
Open the cited article directly.
Judge whether the answer fairly represented the source — useful when auditing AI quality.
Source types
Citations can reference:
Docs articles — open in the widget's Help tab (for widget conversations) or link to the help center.
Website pages — public URLs you connected as knowledge sources.
Help center articles — the public docs site.
Improving citation quality
Citations reflect retrieval, so they improve when content improves:
Make sure the right article exists and is current for each common question.
Keep one canonical article per topic — duplicates force the AI to pick between similar sources.
Use descriptive titles; titles help both retrieval and the customer reading the citation.
Watch Coverage Gaps: recurring unanswered questions usually mean a missing article, and every escalation is a citation that didn't happen.
Limitations
Citations point to content sources; they do not expose internal reasoning or retrieval scores.
Account-specific answers (no source in your content) won't carry citations — expect those to be human territory.
If a source is deleted or unpublished, older answers keep their citation text but the link may no longer resolve.
Related pages
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