Cytado — citations that survive checking.

My own product: you give it a topic and get verified sources with a quote, a page number read from the printed copy and a link to the publication — ready to paste, along with a formatted bibliography. Below: where it came from and what was hardest about building it.

Open Cytado I want a product like this

2,262
verified sources delivered to users: 6.3
sources per query on average: 159,814
pages with the number read from print: 10
source databases, court rulings included

Problem

An invented citation costs more than none.

A paper without sources is simply incomplete. A paper with sources that cannot be found undermines everything around them — including the parts that were perfectly fine.

01

A citation is a promise someone will check

A supervisor, a reviewer, an editor. One reference that cannot be found is enough to cast doubt on everything else in the work.
02

Language models invent sources

And they do it convincingly: a plausible title, a real author's name, a journal that actually exists, a year that fits. Except the article itself was never written.
03

The page number gets invented separately

Even when the publication is real, the page given often has nothing to do with the quoted passage. It is a second layer of the same problem, and a harder one to catch.
04

Checking takes longer than writing

Tracking down each reference, opening the file, finding the sentence and comparing the page number takes more time than generating the whole paragraph did.

Solution

Reverse the order: first the document, then the sentence.

A typical tool generates text and staples citations onto it. Here it works the other way round — the publication is downloaded first, the quote is taken from it, and the citation is built at the end, out of things that have already been read.

First the file, then the sentence

The order is the reverse of a typical AI tool. The publication is downloaded and read in full first, and the citation is built only from what actually appears in it.

Page number read from print

The number printed on the page rather than the file's sheet index — the one a reviewer will see in the paper edition. It was successfully read on 159,814 of 178,545 pages.

Every reference points to a file and a place

The citation leads to a specific document and a specific page, so whoever checks it reaches the source in seconds. When verifying someone else's bibliography, the tool marks entries as confirmed or unconfirmed — it never rules that something is fake.

Works where you write

The web app, a browser extension, add-ins for Word and Google Docs, a WordPress plugin, and an MCP server that lets an AI assistant draw on the same corpus.

From the product

Three places where the difference shows.

Three views. The first shows the result, the second what happens when something cannot be confirmed, the third the same corpus used inside an AI assistant.

Cytado — A citation that survives checking — **A citation that survives checking** A quote taken from the downloaded file, the page number from print, a ready-made bibliography entry and a link to the publication. The label next to the title says outright that the numbering comes from the printed copy.

Cytado — Verifying someone else's bibliography — **Verifying someone else's bibliography** Each entry checked against scholarly databases. Three confirmed, one marked unconfirmed — with no verdict that it is fake, because that is something the tool cannot know.

Cytado — The same corpus inside an AI assistant — **The same corpus inside an AI assistant** An MCP server connected to Claude: the model writes a paragraph and grounds its claims in real publications with page numbers. Nothing gets copy-pasted by hand.

What was hard

What took the most time.

Reading the number printed on the page In a PDF, a page has its sheet index, but a reviewer looks at the number printed in the footer or header — and the two drift apart by a dozen or more positions because of title pages, tables of contents and inserts. On top of that, numbering can be Roman, compound, or restart with every chapter. Without solving this, a citation would point to the wrong place, which is worse than no citation at all.
Filtering out passages that only look relevant Similarity search returns plenty of text that seems on-topic at first glance and turns out to be about something else once read. A separate stage scores every retrieved passage on whether it actually supports the claim — the database already holds over fifty thousand of these judgments. That is why a query returns six sources on average, but ones that hold up.
Ten databases, each with its own rules Crossref, OpenAlex, Semantic Scholar, DOAJ, Europe PMC, CORE, DOAB, Biblioteka Nauki, and SAOS with court rulings. Different formats, different rate limits, different full-text availability. It all had to be reduced to a single shape, accepting that some publications will stay out of reach.
One corpus, six different entry points The app, the browser, Word, Google Docs, WordPress and the MCP server. Each has its own constraints and its own authorization flow, and all of them must return exactly the same citation — otherwise the same quote would look different depending on where it was inserted.

What this means for you

An AI deployment that will pass an audit.

In most companies the biggest trouble with a language model is that nobody knows where an answer came from. Cytado is proof it can be built differently: every sentence points to a document and a place in it, and the system is allowed to say it does not know.

If someone at your company has to manually check whether an answer is backed by documents — contracts, procedures, technical documentation — the same pattern carries over. Write to me and describe how it works today.

Related services

What I do beyond my own products.

Cytado is an AI deployment grounded in real documents. Below is the rest of what I build for companies, with starting prices.

Let's talk

Need answers that point to their source?

Describe the documents you work with and who checks today whether an answer is backed by them. I will tell you whether it can be grounded so that every sentence points to a place in a file, and roughly what a single answer would cost.