Lookio Docs
Lookio websiteOpen Lookio
GuidesCitations

Citations

How an answer cites its sources, what a citation contains and how the source field of a resource appears in it.

Every answer comes from passages of your resources, and cites them. In the text, a citation is a number: [1], [2]. The numbers follow the order of the answer: the first source it uses is always [1].

An answer with the sources open: source 1 from the help center article Issue a credit note, with its section path, passage and address, and source 2 from the refund policy

Open the sources under an answer to read each passage, its path and its address.

What a citation contains

FieldMeaning
nThe number the answer cites it by.
resource_id and titleThe resource the passage comes from.
textThe passage itself, as indexed.
sectionThe headings above the passage, outermost first.
pageThe page, for PDFs, slides and other paged files.
urlThe address, for a web page or a page of a site.
sourceThe resource’s Source field, when it has one.

In the app:

  • Hover over a number to read the passage.
  • Click a number to open the source address in a new tab, or the resource when there is no address.
  • Open sources under the answer to read every passage, with its path (title, headings, page) and its address or source.

Make citations useful

  • Give long texts real headings. Section paths come from Markdown headings. With # Refunds and ## Digital goods, a citation gets a path.
  • Fill the Source field. Set it to the address or reference that a reader must look up, such as “Employee handbook, 2026 edition”. It appears with every citation of the resource.
  • Use clear titles. The title is part of every passage and of every citation.

How an answer is built

flowchart LR Q["Question"] --> S["Search by meaning<br/>and by keywords"] S --> B["Best passages<br/>12 (Deep reads more)"] B --> M["Model, with the context,<br/>guidelines and last messages"] M --> A["Answer"] A --> C["Only the passages<br/>the answer cites"]
From a question to a cited answer
  1. Lookio searches the assistant’s resources, by meaning and by keywords.
  2. It keeps the best passages.
  3. It gives them to the model, with the question, the assistant’s context and guidelines, and the last messages of the conversation.
  4. The model answers only from those passages and cites them.
  5. Lookio returns only the passages that the answer cites.

What to rely on

A citation shows the passage that the answer used, so you can check a claim in seconds. When you pass an answer on, include its citations. When the stakes are high, read the passage.

When the sources do not answer a question, the assistant says so. It does not guess, and the answer has no citation.

In the API

An answer has citations next to answer. See Ask an assistant for the fields. A stored conversation returns the citations of every answer. See Retrieve a conversation.

Use these docs with your AI tools

An AI agent can read this documentation directly. You do not need an account or an API key. Everything here is public and read-only.

Query these docs via MCP

Recommended

Add this server to Claude, Claude Code, Cursor, Mistral, or any tool that supports MCP. Your agent can then search Lookio Docs documentation and read it in full, instead of answering from memory.

https://lookio.app/docs/mcp
  • searchFind the passages that answer a question.
  • fetchRead one page in full, as Markdown.
  • list_pagesSee every page in this documentation.

Query these docs over HTTP

The same tools also work as plain web requests. Use this for scripts, or for any tool that does not support MCP. There is one endpoint per tool. Arguments go in the query string, and the answer comes back as JSON.

https://lookio.app/docs/api/docs/search?query=custom+domain

Read the OpenAPI description. It is built from the same definitions as the tools, so it always matches what the endpoints do.

Read these docs as Markdown

Add .md to any page URL to get its Markdown source. You can also send the headerAccept: text/markdown to the page URL itself.

To read the whole documentation in one file, open llms-full.txt. For a short index of every page, open llms.txt.