Sources & Citations

Financial decisions get made on top of this platform, so provenance is not optional polish — it is part of the product contract. The rules below apply everywhere sources appear: in API responses, in MCP results, and in anything a connected agent relays to you.

Every claim traces to a source

Analytical outputs — development packages, stakeholder assessments — carry their evidence with them:

Original sources vs syntheses

Not everything in a modern retrieval pipeline is a document someone published. Some records are syntheses — outputs of an AI process over other material, such as a grounded web-search summary produced during realtime analysis. We treat the two differently, and honestly:

• A record that corresponds one-to-one with a published source is cited with its original public URL. The publisher's page is the source of truth, and the citation points you there.
• A record that is an AI synthesis is cited as the synthesis it is. The citation resolves to the synthesis record itself — not to a root URL chosen after the fact to look more authoritative. What the analysis actually consumed is what you see cited.

This matters for auditability. If a stakeholder assessment leaned on a synthesized web summary, pretending the citation was a primary document would misrepresent the evidence chain. You always see the true shape of what informed a result.

Source URLs that always resolve

Citations to records that don't have an external public page — syntheses, internal analytical records — come with an Ultralayer source URL:

Code
https://api.ultralayer.ai/source/{source_table}/{source_id}/{access_key}

These links are designed to work wherever a citation ends up — pasted into a chat, forwarded in an email, embedded in a report:

• No sign-in required. The access key embedded in the URL is the authorization; the link resolves in any browser without an account or header.
• Scoped to exactly one record. A key grants access to the one source it was minted for, nothing else.
• Stable. The same citation resolves to the same content later, supporting after-the-fact audits.

We point you to the original

For external published sources, our citations link to the publisher's page rather than to a re-hosted copy on our platform. If Reuters printed it, the citation takes you to Reuters. This is a deliberate policy: the original is the authority, the publisher deserves the visit, and you should never have to trust our copy of someone else's words.

The same principle shapes the Wire: its public surface carries the structured layer — headline, scores, entities, classifications — plus the URL of the underlying source, rather than republishing article bodies.

Judging sources: two orthogonal signals

Structured records carry two fields that are often confused and deliberately kept separate:

A rumor from a highly trustworthy publisher and a confirmed fact from a thin source are different objects, and both dimensions are queryable — see scores & classifications.

What this means in practice

• When an agent gives you an Ultralayer-backed answer, ask it for the quotes and links — they exist for every analytical claim.
• Follow citation links to originals before acting on anything material. The platform is built to make that easy, not to keep you inside it.
• Treat synthesis-backed citations as what they are: labeled AI work-product over other material, useful and inspectable, but not a primary document.