Adovo argues RAG citations need verifiable provenance

Adovo, the source of this analysis, argues that provenance must be preserved at ingestion. This involves retaining source document IDs, version hashes, chunk IDs, and page numbers. Microsoft is noted for recommending a parent field in RAG indexes to support citation previews. The goal is to store enough metadata outside the final prose to reconstruct the answer later.

The piece recommends testing claims by checking if cited passages support factual sentences completely, partially, or not at all. It advises rejecting citation IDs that were not in the retrieved set and marking citations as stale if the source document changes. Users should see a preview with the document title, relevant passage, and version date. Adovo concludes that a citation is a promise of verifiability; if the reference cannot reproduce the evidence, it is merely decoration.