The bracket markers
Inside answers, you'll see [1], [2], etc. Each bracket is a clickable link to the citation card at the bottom of the answer.
What's in a citation card
- Source name — the document title (PDF title, page title, or paper title from Europe PMC)
- Page number — only for PDFs. URL / YouTube / .txt sources don't have pages, so the field is omitted.
- Snippet — the exact passage the model grounded on. This is shorter than the chunk Gemini retrieved (it's the model's pointer back into the chunk).
What "grounded" means
The answer is constrained at generation time to only reference text that's actually in your vault's File Search store. If the corpus can't support the answer, you get the off-topic refusal instead. We chose this trade-off deliberately: false confidence is worse than a friendly "I can't help with this one."
Citation reranking and diversity
The model often grounds on more chunks than you need to read. After retrieval, we run a small Gemini-as-judge pass that scores each citation against the question, drops the bottom half, and applies a diversity filter (at most 2 citations per source). That's why you usually see 3-5 cites per answer even if 8-10 were originally retrieved.
What if a citation looks wrong?
Click into the source from the citation card. If the page or passage doesn't actually support the claim, that's a real problem we want to know about. Send the share link of the bad answer to [email protected].
Public-demo citation differences
On /demo citations show source title + page but no clickable jump-to-source link (the demo vault is anonymous, you wouldn't have read access). After signing up, your own vault's citations are fully clickable.