Citations

Named by Shape of AI. The pattern that separates “search that answers” from “chatbot that asserts.” The interesting design space is where the citation lives: inline superscripts (Perplexity), per-passage jumps (NotebookLM), or source chips (Quark) — each trades reading flow against verifiability differently.

Why it works. Users rarely click sources — but their presence changes trust, and the 5% of clicks that happen are the highest-stakes moments in the product.

Steal: make the jump land on the exact passage, not the page top. Skip: citation theater — decorating ungrounded generation with links it didn’t actually use.

Flow captures for this entry are in progress — screenshots land with the teardown that covers it. Entries never ship images we didn't capture ourselves.