Your RAG answer has citations, but can anyone verify the claim?

An assistant answers with a document link, yet the reviewer cannot find the sentence that supports the claim. A RAG practitioner discussion describes attribution being lost as chunks move through retrieval and generation. A plausible link is not an evidence trail.

Preserve what the model actually saw

At ingestion, retain a source document ID, version or content hash, chunk ID, page or section, and the chunk text used for generation. Microsoft recommends a parent field with each chunk in many RAG indexes; its agentic retrieval response includes reference and source data that can support a citation preview. Store enough of this provenance outside the final prose to reconstruct the answer later.

Test the claim, not the decoration

For each factual sentence in a sample answer, ask whether the cited passage supports it completely, partially or not at all. Reject a citation ID that was never in the retrieved set. If a document changes, make old answers resolve to the version used at answer time or visibly mark the citation stale. A live URL that silently points to new text can make an old answer appear sourced when it is not.

Give users a useful preview

Show the document title, relevant passage, page or section and version date. Provide a path to the full source for context. Keep document access checks in the citation view, so a link does not leak restricted content to a different user. Measure unverifiable claims and stale citations separately from retrieval recall.

Adovo’s view

A citation is a promise that someone else can check the answer. If the reference cannot reproduce the evidence, it is decoration. Build provenance into the data path before asking users to trust the prose.