Skip to main content
This section documents the citationPills data returned by the Perplexity endpoint. Citation pills are part of the Perplexity response — no separate API call is needed.

​
Example request

{
  "prompt": "best laptops for programming",
  "country": "US"
}
This produces a response containing the citationPills array documented below.

​
Overview

Perplexity renders inline bracketed citation markers (e.g. [1][2][3]) next to its answer text. The result.citationPills array exposes those bracketed citations denormalized: each entry is one (pill, source) pair carrying a per-source label (the source’s own page title), a citationPillId that groups entries from the same bracketed citation, and the per-source url/domain/description/position. When a bracketed citation references N sources, the array contains N entries sharing the same citationPillId but carrying different per-source label, url, and domain. Group by citationPillId to recover the citation-level structure. The field is omitted from result when the answer has no pills.

​
Citation pill structure

FieldTypeDescription
labelstringPer-source title from the sources rail (e.g. "Best Programming Laptops 2026 — TechCrunch"). Always present; may be an empty string when the rail has no title for this source — read domain / url for source identity in that case.
citationPillIdinteger1-based ordinal shared by all entries from the same chip.
urlstringDirect URL of the cited source.
domainstringHost extracted from url, for grouping and display.
descriptionstringSource snippet from the sources rail when Perplexity ships one. Omitted when absent.
positioninteger1-based position of this source in the sibling result.sources array.

​
Response example

{
  "success": true,
  "result": {
    "text": "Here are several laptops for programming...",
    "sources": [
      {
        "position": 1,
        "url": "https://techcrunch.com/laptops",
        "label": "Best Programming Laptops 2026 — TechCrunch",
        "description": "Latest laptop reviews and recommendations"
      },
      {
        "position": 2,
        "url": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=example",
        "label": "Best Laptops 2026",
        "description": "Video review of programming laptops"
      },
      {
        "position": 3,
        "url": "https://wired.com/programming-laptops",
        "label": "Wired Laptop Buyer's Guide",
        "description": "Programming laptop buyer's guide"
      }
    ],
    "citationPills": [
      {
        "label": "Best Programming Laptops 2026 — TechCrunch",
        "citationPillId": 1,
        "url": "https://techcrunch.com/laptops",
        "domain": "techcrunch.com",
        "description": "Latest laptop reviews and recommendations",
        "position": 1
      },
      {
        "label": "Wired Laptop Buyer's Guide",
        "citationPillId": 1,
        "url": "https://wired.com/programming-laptops",
        "domain": "wired.com",
        "description": "Programming laptop buyer's guide",
        "position": 3
      }
    ]
  }
}