The rule. Attach each important claim to a source a reader can open, land in the right passage of, and confirm the claim from, with no knowledge of how the system was built.
Why. In a controlled two stage user study of retrieval augmented generation responses, explanations such as source attribution significantly guided participants toward the objectively higher quality answer, though judgments were also shaped by clarity, actionability, and prior knowledge (Łajewska & Balog, 2026). Verification does not happen on its own: NN/g reports that people rarely click citation links, while chatbot citations are often hallucinated, point to nonexistent URLs, or link to real pages that do not support the claim they sit under (Chan, 2025). The presentation fixes are documented: place the source next to the specific claim it supports, link to the relevant part of the page, and label the link with the publication or article name instead of the word Source (Chan, 2025).
Seen in the wild. Perplexity places inline citation tags directly next to the referenced text, and Copilot previews each source on hover (Chan, 2025).