AI chatbot with source citations for every answer
Updated
Short answer
Paperlink AI answers customer questions only from the documents you upload and the pages you import from your website. Each answer cites the passages it used, and your team sees the document and page behind every answer in the dashboard. Visitors get the answer; your team gets the proof.
A support chatbot is only useful if your team can trust what it tells customers. The way to earn that trust is simple to state: every answer should come from a page you wrote, and someone on your team should be able to see which page. This page explains how Paperlink AI does that, what your team sees, and what to check when you compare any chatbot that claims to cite its sources.
How it works in Paperlink AI
Your content becomes passages
When you upload a document or import pages from your website, Paperlink AI extracts the text and splits it into passages of about 400 tokens. The split follows your headings and keeps tables whole, so a passage reads like a section of the original page, not a random slice. Each passage gets a short label and is indexed two ways: by meaning and by keywords.
A question picks the passages first
When a visitor asks a question, the bot searches the passages both ways and merges the results. When the search is not sure which passages fit, it ranks the results a second time. The five strongest passages, with the passages next to them, go to the answer model. Nothing else does: not the open web, not general knowledge.
The answer must cite, or refuse
The model has one rule: answer only from these sources, cite each fact, and say so when the answer is not there. If no passage is relevant, the bot does not write an answer at all. It says it does not know and shows your contact card, which is covered on the human handoff page.
In our internal evaluation (September 2026), the bot answered 93.8% of answerable questions correctly, refused 100% of the questions it should have refused, and cited the correct source in 97.9% of answers. These are our own test numbers on our own test set, so test the bot with your own content before you rely on it.
What your team sees
Citations are for your team. Visitors see a clean answer in the widget, and your team sees the evidence in the dashboard:
| Place | What it shows |
|---|---|
| Playground | Ask the bot a question yourself and read the answer with its citation chips before visitors do. |
| Conversations | Every question from the widget and the Playground, with an outcome label such as Answered or Didn't know. |
| Question drawer | The answer, the sources with document and page, whether it came from the answer cache or your documents, and the follow-up questions. |
| Overview | The documents that the bot cites most in the last 30 days, with each one's share of the citations. |
The Overview list is a quick health check. If one old PDF carries most of the citations, that document shapes most of your answers, and it is the first one to review.
When two documents disagree
Real help centers contain old versions: last year's pricing PDF, a policy page that was rewritten. Paperlink AI does not guess which one is current from the upload date. You decide. Set a Supersedes link on the newer document and it outranks the older one, which stays searchable but ranks lower. Give a document a future effective date and it outranks nothing until that date. The steps are in Versions, effective dates and supersedes.
What to look for in any tool
Many chatbots say they cite sources. These questions separate a citation you can audit from a link added for show:
- Is the answer limited to the cited passages? A bot can cite a page and still add facts from general knowledge. Ask the vendor what the model receives and what it is told to do when the passages are silent.
- Does a citation name the exact document and page? A link to your help center home page tells you nothing. You need the specific source to check a wrong answer in seconds.
- Can your team review past answers? Citations in the live chat help one visitor. A searchable log of questions with their sources helps your team fix the content behind many answers.
- What happens with conflicting versions? Ask how the tool chooses between an old and a new document. "The newest upload wins" breaks as soon as someone re-uploads an old file.
- Does it refuse when nothing fits? Citations and refusals belong together. A bot that must cite but may not refuse will cite a loosely related page to cover a guess.
Test this yourself: ask ten questions your content answers and five it does not. Check each citation against the page. The chatbot selection checklist has more questions to ask, and how to stop a chatbot from making up answers explains why bots invent facts in the first place.
Make your content easy to cite
A citation is only as clear as the page behind it. Short sections with descriptive headings produce passages that answer one question each. The free readability checker flags long sentences, and the AI answer generator shows how an answer built only from your own text reads, before you sign up.
Frequently asked questions
Are citations shown to visitors in the widget?
No. Visitors see the answer in the widget. Your team sees the citations in the dashboard: in the Playground, on the Conversations page and in the question drawer, with the document and page for each source.
What does a citation point to?
The document and the page that the passage came from. For an imported website, the document is the web page that the bot read.
Can the bot answer from general knowledge when my content is silent?
No. The answer model gets only the passages that search found in your content, with the rule to answer only from them. When no passage fits, the bot says it does not know and shows your contact card.
What happens when two of my documents disagree?
A newer document outranks an older one only when you set a Supersedes link on it, and a document with a future effective date outranks nothing until that date. Upload date alone never decides which document wins.
How do I check that an answer used the right page?
Open the question on the Conversations page. The drawer shows the answer with its citation chips, the sources it used, and whether the answer came from the 24-hour answer cache or from your documents.
Related
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