Get Started with Citations in Apex

These Apex classes enable developers to add citations to a custom action programmatically. To add citations to a custom action, you’ll need to implement it with an Apex class.

Citations can be consumed via employee agents as well as through calls to the Agent API. For more information on citations for employee agents and Knowledge Action, see Build Trust in AI Responses with Citations in Salesforce Help.

This guide assumes you have experience developing Apex custom actions. For more information, review these guides:

• Apex Developer Guide
• Create Actions with Apex REST Agent Actions

Citations is an Agentforce feature and it requires agents to be enabled in your org. See Set Up Agents in Salesforce Help.

For an agent action to include citations, the Apex action must use several citation-specific variables and types. Supported sources are unstructured data, such as knowledge articles, data from PDF files, and information from external web pages. To see citations in your agent responses, the agent must be activated.

For an agent to correctly return citations, an Apex action class must include citation input and/or output classes.

• AiCopilot.GenAiCitationInput: This enables an action to add sources to the agent reasoning context. The reasoning engine can then call the citations platform if there are valid sources referenced in the response.
• AiCopilot.GenAiCitationOutput: This enables actions to directly provide citations for responses without calling the citations platform.

If you want your agent action to generate text based on provided sources and determine relevant citations automatically, use GenAiCitationInput. If you want your agent action to generate text and citations based on predetermined logic, use GenAiCitationOutput.

For more information on citation types, see Citations Apex Reference.

The GenAiCitationInput class supplies the Agentforce reasoning engine with citation information. From there, the reasoning engine can determine where and how citations are added to generated content.

To generate citations from a GenAiCitationInput Apex class, you must return the generated response as well as the citation metadata to the agent. In the example implementation, the response is generated from a prompt template and retriever.

The GenAiCitationOutput type provides direct control over how custom actions surface citations for source information. GenAiCitationOutput bypasses the reasoning engine’s logic and allows for explicit insertion of citations.

If you have actions that you want to always return specific citations, use GenAiCitationOutput. Otherwise, use GenAiCitationInput and allow the action to call the citation platform when necessary.

We’ll walk through how to deploy an Apex class that uses citations to our org. This example invokes a prompt template using Connect API, parses the response, and returns a GenAiCitationInput object back to the Agentforce reasoning engine.

As a prerequisite, ensure that you have agents and Prompt Builder enabled in your org.

Copy and paste the following Apex class into your development environment.

For GenAiCitationInput, the Apex class must return data that the Agentforce reasoning engine can use to generate a response. The prompt template and retriever are invoked, and the response from the agent contains relevant inline citations.