Source trail

A source trail is the link kept on every claim back to the original evidence behind it, so any answer or decision can be opened and checked against the record it came from.

A source trail is the link kept on every claim back to the original evidence behind it, so any answer or decision can be opened and checked against the record it came from. Each fact carries a pointer to where it started: a meeting note, an email thread, a saved document, or a captured transcript. Suppose you ask your assistant which deadline a project agreed on, and it answers 'next Friday' with a link to the call where that was decided. You click the link, read the exact line, and confirm it before you act. Without that trail, you get a confident sentence and no way to check it.

Builder example

When you tell an AI to answer from your own records, the difference between a usable system and a guessing one is whether each answer carries its source. A support assistant that says 'refunds take five business days' and links to the policy page lets an agent verify the rule before quoting it to a customer. If the assistant cannot point to where a claim came from, you cannot tell a remembered fact from an invented one, and you end up rechecking everything by hand.

Common confusion: A source trail links a claim to the evidence it came from. Personal retrieval is the act of asking your records a question; the source trail is the citation the answer carries back. Retrieval without a source trail returns an answer you still have to trust on faith.