Skip to main content

How Citations Work

When an AI assistant references information from your organization’s documents, it includes numbered citations in its response. These citations provide traceability — you can verify every claim by checking the original source. Citations appear as clickable numbers (e.g., [1], [2]) within the AI’s response text.

Viewing Source Details

Click any citation number to open the Source Details Panel on the right side of the screen. The panel displays:

Source Types

Sources can come from any connected data source:
  • Box — Documents stored in your organization’s Box account
  • Google Drive — Files from connected Google Drive folders
  • SharePoint — Documents from SharePoint sites and libraries
  • File Upload — Files uploaded directly to a conversation

Trusting AI Responses

Experio’s citation system helps you:
  • Verify answers — Click through to the original document to confirm the AI’s interpretation.
  • Find more context — The source preview shows surrounding content that may provide additional detail.
  • Track data freshness — The “Last Modified” date tells you how current the information is.
  • Access originals — Use the direct URL link to open the file in its native application (Box, Google Drive, SharePoint).

Citations and your access

Citations are filtered to your own access, exactly like the answer itself. You will only ever see a citation for a record you are allowed to read, and the source documents listed in the Provenance tab are filtered the same way. One consequence is worth knowing, because it looks like a fault and is not one: a correct answer can arrive with no citation chips at all. This happens on very broad questions — “list our companies” against several hundred — when you are entitled to a small share of them. The figures in the answer are still filtered to your access; only the chips are missing. Asking something narrower, about a named company or engagement, brings them back. If citations disappear on every question, including narrow ones, that is worth reporting to an administrator — see Graph access control.

Graph entity provenance

When the AI cites a knowledge graph entity (not just a document), you can trace how that entity’s data was created or updated:
  • In the Provenance tab, see which source documents each node came from, and click a node to open it in Explore Graph
  • In the Graph Context tab, see the relationships retrieved for the answer and click a name to open it in Explore Graph
  • In the graph explorer, select a node and review the Graph Lineage timeline
Lineage shows document ingestion, structured imports, enrichment rules, and manual review actions — including which properties changed and which LLM model was used when applicable. See Graph Lineage for a full overview. In the graph explorer, a node’s Sources (N) heading counts the files that mention it. For a node that many files mention, the answer keeps only its first five sources: N is still the full number of files, and a line under the list reads +M more not kept with this answer.
If an AI response doesn’t include citations, it may be drawing on general knowledge rather than your organization’s specific documents. Ask the assistant to “cite sources” or “show references” to encourage document-grounded answers.