AI THAT CITES ITS SOURCES
An assistant that shows you the evidence it used
If what you want is an assistant that cites the open web, use one of the ones that do — they are free or nearly free, they cover everything published, and they need no setup. GI JI cites nothing on the open web. Every citation it gives points at a passage inside a document you imported yourself. This page is about what that narrower promise buys you, and what it costs.
Where a web-citing assistant is the better tool — said first, on purpose
It can search material you have never imported. It can answer about recent public information. It costs nothing to try and runs on a phone. If your question is about the world rather than about your own material, GI JI is the wrong tool. In Sources only, GI JI can stop when imported material does not support an answer. Nothing on this page is an argument against that; it is an argument for a different job.
Three things GI JI does that a link at the bottom of an answer does not
It separates cited from merely retrieved. Searching your library turns up passages; only some of them end up supporting the sentence you are reading. GI JI lists both and marks which is which, so you are never left guessing whether a source in the list actually did any work.
It opens the exact stored passage. A citation is not a filename and not a page number. Clicking it puts the stored text GI JI actually read beside the answer, so checking a claim takes a second rather than a hunt through a PDF.
It can stop instead of composing. In Sources only, if GI JI cannot attach enough usable evidence from your documents, it can stop without producing an answer. No answer-writing AI call is made for that refusal.
What we measured, and what that measurement is worth
In two runs of a frozen 54-row benchmark, GI JI produced zero fabricated citations. Of 36 rows treated as answerable, 21 answers were source-backed and seven actually cited a source. This is our own bounded testing, not an independent audit, and it does not predict every answer or document.
A citation is also not a guarantee that an answer is right. It shows you what an answer rested on so that you can judge it. GI JI does not replace your reading, and it is not legal, medical, financial, or compliance advice.
The limits, said here so you do not meet them later
GI JI does not read scans. It imports text-based PDFs, DOCX files, notes, HTML and permitted websites; a scan-only PDF has no text to cite, so GI JI refuses it rather than importing it empty. It refuses more often than a cloud assistant does, by design — in Sources only it under-answers rather than inventing, and some questions a person would call answerable come back as a refusal. A Personal licence activates on one computer at a time; deactivate it to move it. And the one-time setup needs the internet to fetch the local models. After setup, GI JI needs no internet to read your documents and answer questions from them.
The one-line version
If you want an answer about the world with a link underneath it, use a web-citing assistant. If you want to know exactly which of your own passages an answer rests on — with a Sources only mode that can stop when support is missing — that is GI JI, for $79 once.
WATCH IT WORK
Answer, cited passage, and an honest refusal.
Ask a question of your own documents, open the cited passage, then use Sources only for a question the library does not support and watch GI JI stop without writing an answer.
HOW GI JI COMPARES
Where GI JI wins, and where it does not.
Three comparisons with the tools you are most likely choosing between, each one naming the case where the other tool is the better buy.
WRITTEN FOR ONE READER
Four pages that answer one question properly instead of all of them briefly — what a citation is actually worth, what GI JI is and is not for a technical reader, how it stands beside a note library, and what it does for work whose material cannot leave the computer.