Citations and traceability

The biggest advantage of RAG is not speed but traceability. A good setup shows the source passage next to every answer, with the document title and date, so people can check instead of trusting blindly.

Instruct the model to answer only from the retrieved passages, to cite them, and to say it does not know when the passages do not contain the answer. An honest “I could not find this in our documents” is far more valuable than a fluent guess.

Traceability also helps you improve the system. When users flag a wrong answer, the cited sources show immediately whether retrieval failed, the document itself is wrong, or the model misread a correct passage.