Grounded answer citations
Ask which words actually justify the answer
Review a citation feature by tracing a consequential sentence back to its evidence. A list of numbered links is only the beginning.
In this article
Pick a statement that could change an action
Start the review with an answer about a threshold, exception or approval condition. Ask the engineer to identify the exact passage that supports the actionable sentence. If the demonstration only shows that the document title is relevant, the review has not reached the important question.
Compare the sentence with the source in full context. Look for missing qualifiers, changed units and wording that turns a possibility into a requirement. These errors often survive general relevance checks because the answer and source discuss the same subject.
Also ask what the system does when no passage supports the requested conclusion. A design that can only return a complete answer has no honest representation for incomplete evidence.
Trace the reference through code
Inspect where evidence identifiers are created and resolved. They should come from application-owned records tied to the retrieval result. Generated URLs and arbitrary identifiers need rejection, not optimistic rendering.
Review schema validation, length limits and failure handling. A malformed answer should not bypass citation checks through a fallback plain-text renderer that presents the same claims without references. Fallback behaviour is part of the feature's reliability and deserves the same scrutiny as the success path.
Confirm that source version and passage location survive storage, caching and export. A correctly rendered live answer can lose its evidence trail when converted into a PDF, email or saved conversation.
Examine the evaluation evidence
Request examples of false passes, not only successful demonstrations. A strong evaluation set includes a relevant citation beside an unsupported statement, conflicting source revisions and a rule whose exception appears elsewhere in the document.
If a model evaluates support, inspect how its decisions were checked against human review. Ask which types of error it misses and how the product contains those failures. An evaluator's confidence is not a substitute for evidence about its performance on the intended material.
Separate support, completeness and accessibility results. A response can be fully supported but fail to answer the question, or answer correctly while linking to evidence the reader cannot inspect. Each failure needs a different remedy.
Walk through a source change
Finish by changing the source rather than the prompt. Move the document, publish a new version and revoke the reader's access in a test environment. Observe old answers as well as newly generated ones.
The review should leave a short record of unresolved decisions: whether historical excerpts are retained, how unsupported claims are presented and who owns broken-reference incidents. These decisions are more useful than a checklist marked complete without examples. The feature is ready when a reviewer can follow the evidence relationship and understand where it stops being reliable.
Primary sources
Microsoft Learn: groundedness evaluationOWASP: authorisation guidanceReferences checked 11 September 2026.