Practical guide
How to require citations in an AI summary
Treat URL provenance as a data constraint, not a writing preference. Capture source URLs before generation, attach only links present in the source material Scottie read, and validate each rendered claim-to-source relationship.[1][2]
Why this gets difficult
An AI summary can display plausible links that were never part of the input or attach one general source to a paragraph containing several unsupported claims.[1][2]
A practical way through
- Create a dated source snapshot containing the canonical URL and readable source material.[1][2]
- Generate the summary without allowing the model to invent or format destination URLs.[1][2]
- Attach links programmatically from the dated source snapshot after generation.[1][2]
- Reject output whose claim cannot be traced to the cited source or whose link was absent from the input.[1][2]
An example
The situation: A generated paragraph combines a price change, launch date, and analyst opinion while citing only a product homepage.[1][2]
What changes: Each factual component is checked against the source pages, unsupported material is removed through rejection, and links are attached from the validated input records.[1][2]
What you get: The final summary has fewer claims but an original links the reader can actually inspect.[1][2]
What to watch for
Sources worth keeping
How Scottie helps
Scottie records source URLs before writing and attaches those links afterward instead of asking generated prose to invent them.[3]