Retrieval and the citation contract

Whatever strategy you pick, design it so the model can cite precisely. That means:

• Preserve and expose location information (page numbers, section ids) with the retrieved text, so the model can point at exactly where a fact came from.
• Prefer returning verbatim text the model can quote, over paraphrased or pre-summarised content.
• If you chunk, keep chunks aligned to meaningful boundaries and carry their source location, so a citation resolves back to a real place in a real document.

For grounded, auditable agents, retrieval and citation are two halves of one design: the way you fetch content determines how precisely the model can attribute its claims. (Chapter 17 returns to this for regulated domains.)