Microsoft Copilot citation pills schema

This section documents the citationPills data returned by the Microsoft Copilot endpoint. Citation pills are part of the Copilot response — no separate API call is needed. For use cases, pricing context, and copy-paste examples, see the Copilot sources API page on the product site.

Example request

{
  "prompt": "best laptops for programming",
  "country": "US"
}

This produces a response containing the citationPills array documented below.

Overview

Copilot streams citation events alongside its answer text. Consecutive citation events are grouped into one visible chip; the result.citationPills array exposes those chips denormalized: each entry is one (pill, source) pair carrying a per-source label (the source’s own title from the citation event), a citationPillId that groups entries from the same chip, and the per-source url/domain/description/position. When a pill cites 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 pill-level structure. The field is omitted from result when the answer has no pills.

Citation pill structure

Field	Type	Description
`label`	string	Per-source title from the citation event (e.g. `"Microsoft 365 Documentation"`). Always present; may be an empty string when the event ships no title — read `domain` / `url` for source identity in that case.
`citationPillId`	integer	1-based ordinal shared by all entries from the same chip.
`url`	string	Direct URL of the cited source.
`domain`	string	Host extracted from `url`, for grouping and display.
`description`	string	Source snippet from the citation event when Copilot ships one. Omitted when absent.
`position`	integer	1-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://docs.microsoft.com/",
        "label": "Microsoft 365 Documentation",
        "description": "Official development documentation"
      },
      {
        "position": 2,
        "url": "https://github.com/microsoft/vscode",
        "label": "VS Code on GitHub",
        "description": "Visual Studio Code repository"
      }
    ],
    "citationPills": [
      {
        "label": "Microsoft 365 Documentation",
        "citationPillId": 1,
        "url": "https://docs.microsoft.com/",
        "domain": "docs.microsoft.com",
        "description": "Official development documentation",
        "position": 1
      },
      {
        "label": "VS Code on GitHub",
        "citationPillId": 1,
        "url": "https://github.com/microsoft/vscode",
        "domain": "github.com",
        "description": "Visual Studio Code repository",
        "position": 2
      }
    ]
  }
}

Overview

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Utilities

Microsoft Copilot citation pills schema

Example request

Overview

Citation pill structure

Response example

​Example request

​Overview

​Citation pill structure

​Response example

Example request

Overview

Citation pill structure

Response example