Add citations to every RAG answer

A teammate asked where an answer came from and I had no way to show them.

IntermediateRead 5 minDoing: a couple of hours, once your pipeline already retrieves chunks and can enforce a JSON schema7 steps

▶ Start

What you'll have at the end

A RAG answer whose claims each carry a citation checked against the real source text, with a clickable link for every claim that survives the check and nothing shown for the ones that don't.

Before you start

You need

A RAG pipeline that already retrieves a handful of chunks for a question, and a model call that can enforce a JSON schema with an enum-constrained field.

Not covered

Whether a cited passage is actually correct or still current, only whether the model's quote genuinely sits inside it.

Leans on

7 steps

Where to go next

Make your RAG system say it does not know instead of guessing

when every citation in a reply fails the check and nothing verified is left to show

Checked 15 Aug 2026

Part of the RAG (Retrieval Augmented Generation) cookbook