Where a Web Research Answer Got Its Sources
Web research answers arrive with their sources attached as numbered, clickable markers — hover to see the source, click to copy its link.
Overview
When you ask Sapience to research something on the web, the answer comes back with its sources attached — each one a small numbered marker in the text, and each one clickable.
This matters more than it sounds. A research answer without its sources is an assertion: you have to take it on trust, and if you want to check it, verify it, or send it to someone else, you are back to searching for the page yourself. With the sources attached, every claim in the answer has somewhere you can go to read the original.
The sources travel with the message, so they are still there tomorrow when you scroll back to the conversation.
What you will see
An answer that drew on web research looks like ordinary prose with small numbered markers in it — [1], [2], [3] — one per source the research used.
Hover a marker and its source appears in a small panel. Click the panel and the full link is copied to your clipboard, ready to paste into an email, a note, or your browser address bar. The panel stays put while you move the pointer onto it, so there is no race to catch it.
Markers that point to one of your own files rather than a web page behave the same way and copy the file name — so a mixed answer that used both your documents and the open web shows you which claim came from which.
The two ways research reaches you
You do not have to do anything differently in either case — the sources appear the same way. When you chat with the Web Research Agent directly, the whole conversation is research, and every answer carries the sources it used. When you ask another agent something and it decides to research the web part-way through, it folds what it found into its answer and the sources it used are attached there alongside anything else it drew on.
The second case is the common one in ordinary use: you ask a broad question, the agent works out that part of it needs current information from the web, and goes and gets it. You see the sources for that part without having asked for research explicitly.
What happens behind the scenes
- You ask a question — either directly to the Web Research Agent, or to any agent that decides the question needs current information from the web.
- The research runs. Sapience searches the web and gets back both an answer and the list of pages that answer was built from.
- Sapience keeps the list. The sources are taken from the research result itself rather than being written out by the agent in prose — so which sources you see does not depend on the agent remembering to list them.
- The answer is assembled with its markers. Each distinct source becomes one numbered marker, and the same page cited twice keeps the same number rather than appearing twice.
- The whole thing is saved. The markers are part of the message that gets stored, which is why they are still clickable when you return to the conversation later.
If an answer has no sources
Not every answer is a research answer. If the agent answered from what it already knew, from your files, or from a tool that is not web research, there are no web sources to show and no markers will appear. That is expected — a marker means "this came from a page, here it is", so no marker means no page was used.
Summary
Web research answers arrive with their sources attached as numbered, clickable markers, whether you asked the Web Research Agent directly or another agent went and researched mid-answer. Hover a marker to see the source, click to copy its link. The sources are stored with the message, so an answer stays checkable long after the conversation has moved on.