An answer without a citation is a guess with good grammar

The first thing a sceptical reader does with a generated answer is look for where it came from. If there is nowhere to look, they either trust it blindly or discard it. Both outcomes are bad.

Cite the passage, not the document

"Source: employee-handbook.pdf" is barely better than nothing when the handbook is 90 pages. Link to the chunk, and show the surrounding sentences on hover. The reader should be able to confirm the claim in about three seconds.

Show what was retrieved but not used

A retrieval trace that lists every candidate passage — with its score, and whether it made the final context — turns debugging from guesswork into reading. When an answer is wrong, the trace usually tells you immediately whether the failure was retrieval or generation.

Make an ungrounded answer visibly ungrounded

If the model produced a sentence that no retrieved passage supports, say so in the interface rather than letting it sit next to well-sourced sentences. A confident paragraph with one silent invention in it is more dangerous than an answer that admits it does not know.