AI Citation
A source link an AI answer includes to back up part of what it says.
What is AI Citation?
An AI citation is a source link that an AI-generated answer includes to back up a specific claim, letting the reader click through to the original page. For example, if you ask an AI search tool a health question and it responds with a statement followed by a small numbered link to a medical website, that link is a citation. Not every AI answer includes citations. Some AI systems answer purely from what the model has learned internally, without pointing to any external source.
Why it matters
Mechanically, citations are produced when an AI system retrieves live web content (via search or a retrieval pipeline) and the model is prompted or constrained to attribute specific statements to specific retrieved documents, rather than answering purely from parametric memory. Different AI products implement this differently: OpenAI's web search tool attaches inline citation annotations (URL, title, and text span) to model output and separately exposes a full list of consulted sources; Perplexity's pipeline runs retrieval, multi-stage ranking, and then generation with citations pre-attached to passages during synthesis, typically surfacing 5–10 numbered citations per answer; and Google's AI Overviews attach citation links to specific claims within the summary, drawing on pages that are indexed and eligible for standard search results, with organic ranking as the strongest (but not only) predictor of which pages get cited. Anthropic's Claude API offers a comparable capability through its Citations feature, which grounds responses in supplied documents and returns the exact passages used to generate each claim.