An answer you can't check is just a rumour

Ask an AI assistant a question about your own documents and you get a confident paragraph back. The paragraph might be right. It might be subtly wrong. It might be describing a clause from last year's version of the contract. Without a way to check, you can't tell the difference — and an answer you can't check is just a rumour with good grammar.

That's why citations aren't a feature we added to AskMyDocs. They're the contract the product is built around: every answer must show its work.

What a citation actually is here

When AskMyDocs answers, each claim carries a numbered marker — [1], [2] — and each number maps to a specific passage in a specific document. Click one and the source panel opens: the exact quoted passage, the document's title, the page it came from, and which version of the document it is. If you have permission to download the file, a permission-checked download button sits right there.

“The Lessee shall give not less than two (2) months' written notice of intention to vacate the premises…” — Rental agreement 2024.pdf · page 4 · v2

That last part matters more than it looks. A citation that says "somewhere in this 60-page PDF" is a homework assignment. A citation that says page 4, version 2 is a fifteen-second verification.

Where the passages come from

Under the hood, your documents are split into passages and indexed two ways: semantically (so "notice period" finds "intention to vacate") and by keyword (so an invoice number finds the invoice). Both result lists are fused and re-ranked, and only the passages that survive re-ranking are handed to the model with instructions to answer from them and nothing else. The numbered citations you see are those passages — not decorations added after the fact.

The honest empty answer

The second half of the contract: when nothing relevant exists in your library, AskMyDocs says so. If the re-ranker finds no passage that actually addresses your question, the product tells you it couldn't find an answer in your documents — instead of assembling a plausible paragraph from weak matches. A confident "I don't know" is worth more than a fluent guess, because you can act on it: the answer isn't written down yet, so go write it down.

Citations respect permissions too

One more property that matters in a team: citations never leak. Access control runs inside retrieval itself, so a document you can't open is never a candidate for your answer — which means it can never show up as your citation either. Two people can ask the identical question and get differently-sourced answers, each fully cited from the documents they're allowed to see.

Try the loop

The habit we hope you build: ask, read, click the citation, check us. The whole product is designed to survive that loop. Connect a drive on the free plan and put it to the test.