Where your bot's sources come from

What this does for you

When your bot looks something up on the web, its answer shows where each fact came from. The sources under an answer are pages your bot actually searched or read while it worked on your message, so you can check them and pass the answer on with confidence.

How it works

1. When your bot searches the web, every result it is shown gets a number. When it opens a page to read it, that page gets a number too.
2. In its answer, your bot puts that number next to a fact, like [2]. Each number becomes a source under the answer, with the page's title and site.
3. Only pages the bot read are cited. A number that does not match a page the bot searched or read is taken out of the answer, and a link the bot wrote itself, without having found it, is never shown as a source.
4. If your bot used the web but forgot to cite anything, the answer still shows the pages it read (or, if it read none, the results it searched), up to five.

A worked example

You ask "what's in the news about energy prices this week?". Your bot searches, reads five articles and writes five headlines. Each headline ends with its own number, and the answer carries five sources, one per headline, each naming the site it came from.

What stays the same

• An answer your bot wrote from what it already knows, without searching, has no sources.
• Your sources are kept with your organisation's conversation and are never visible to another organisation.

See also

• Read a transcript — how an answer is laid out in the chat.