Verified citations.
Proof you can click.AI tools routinely cite sources that don't say what the answer claims. Sidenote checks every quote against the document, server-side, before you ever see it.
Not wrong, exactly. Untrue.
The scary failure isn't an AI inventing a fake paper. It's an AI citing a real source for a claim that source never makes. The citation looks like evidence, reads like evidence, and is checked by almost no one. Three shapes it takes:
The confident stretch
The source is real, but it doesn't say what the answer claims. The model adds a characterization the document never makes, and the citation lends it borrowed authority.
The opinion turned fact
The document quotes someone's view; the answer restates it as a general truth. Nothing was invented, but the claim is no longer what the source supports.
The decorative citation
A citation marker sits at the end of the sentence, but the passage it points to is about something else entirely. It looks checkable; almost nobody checks.
This failure mode has been measured.
A 2025 arXiv study, “Not Wrong, But Untrue: LLM Overconfidence in Document-Based Queries” (Hagar, Agustianto & Diakopoulos), gave popular AI tools a reporting-style task over a 300-document corpus and annotated the answers sentence by sentence. The share of responses containing at least one hallucination:
NotebookLM
2 of 15 responses contained at least one hallucination.
ChatGPT
6 of 15 responses contained at least one hallucination.
Gemini 2.5 Pro
4 of 10 responses contained at least one hallucination.
The authors' sharpest finding matches this page's title: most hallucinations weren't invented facts but “interpretive overconfidence”, unsupported characterizations of real sources and attributed opinions restated as general statements. To be clear: Sidenote was not part of this study, and we don't quote its numbers as a benchmark of Sidenote. We cite it because it is careful, public evidence that citations without verification aren't evidence at all.
A quote is verbatim, or the citation is gone.
Verification isn't a policy or a prompt instruction; it's an architectural step that every answer passes through on the server.
Answers come from retrieved passages
Sidenote retrieves the relevant chunks of the document you're reading and answers from those, not from the model's general knowledge.
Every citation carries a quote
Each cited claim must include the exact words it rests on. No quote, no citation: a claim can't borrow authority it doesn't show.
Quotes are rectified server-side
Before the answer reaches you, the server checks each quote against the actual chunk text. A displayed quote is a verbatim substring of the source, or the citation is dropped.
Click-through to the highlighted passage
Clicking a citation scrolls the live document to the passage and highlights it, so the final check is yours, and it takes about a second.
The same verification runs behind summaries, cited chat, explanations and glossaries.
Run a verified summary right now.
Paste a link or upload a small file and get a live cited summary. Expand any citation to see the verbatim quote the server matched against the source. No account needed.
What verification does not guarantee.
Verification covers the quoted evidence. It guarantees that every quote shown to you is genuinely, verbatim, in the document, and that a claim the document can't back has lost its citation rather than kept a decorative one.
It does not guarantee the answer's reasoning. A model can quote the right sentence and still draw the wrong conclusion from it, weigh it badly, or miss the paragraph that changes the picture. That is exactly why the click-through matters: the citation puts the real passage one click away, so the final judgment stays with you, made in seconds instead of minutes.
Sidenote's promise is deliberately narrow: the evidence you're shown is real, and checking it costs one click. We publish no accuracy percentage for Sidenote answers, because we haven't run a third-party benchmark that would justify one. An honest verification page should hold itself to the standard it describes.
Verified citations, answered.
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