Citation guide / 2026

Cited AI Workflows: From Public Sources to Reviewable Answers in 2026

A citation is useful only if it helps a reader inspect evidence. Retrieval systems should preserve URLs early, avoid mixing unrelated sources into one record, and let a chat UI present a source beside an answer.

Quick answer

Citations should survive the handoff from retrieval to UI.

Keep the canonical source URL and useful dates with each extracted record. When an answer mentions a fact, link back to the record that supported it.

curl --get 'https://extractor.sh/api/extract' \
  --data-urlencode 'url=https://example.com/' \
  --data-urlencode 'format=json'

Available data

What you can extract

Canonical source URLs
Public author and date fields
Readable evidence content
Structured attributes for UI rendering

AI workflows

Where normalized data helps

Research copilots
Editorial review
Customer-support answers
Compliance and audit trails

AI-ready output

Markdown for models. JSON for systems.

Raw HTML consumes tokens on navigation, scripts, styling, and interface labels. Clean Markdown keeps the readable hierarchy for LLM prompts and RAG chunks. Normalized JSON is better when your application needs an explicit semantic type, source, author, publication date, media, attributes, and collection items.

Always retain the canonical URL from the response. AI-generated summaries should remain traceable to the public source, especially when the underlying page can change.

Boundaries

Public data only

Citations need deliberate claim-to-evidence mapping.
A source can be outdated or wrong.
A link alone is not verification.

extractor.sh does not bypass CAPTCHAs, login walls, paywalls, access controls, or regional restrictions. Review the source’s terms and applicable law before collecting or reusing data.