Google Gemini citation pills schema

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

Example request

{
  "prompt": "what is quantum computing",
  "country": "US"
}

This produces a response containing the citationPills array documented below.

Overview

Gemini renders inline citation chips (icon-only chain-link glyphs, and “section-summary” chips that group multiple sources behind a single visible pill) next to its answer text. The result.citationPills array exposes those chips 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 chip, and the per-source url/domain/description/position. When a chip cites N sources (including section-summary chips), 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 sources rail (e.g. `"Wikipedia - Quantum Computing"`). 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.
`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 sources rail when Gemini 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": "Quantum computing is a multidisciplinary field...",
    "sources": [
      {
        "position": 1,
        "url": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_computing",
        "label": "Wikipedia - Quantum Computing",
        "description": "Quantum computing is a multidisciplinary field..."
      },
      {
        "position": 2,
        "url": "https://www.ibm.com/quantum",
        "label": "IBM Quantum",
        "description": "IBM's quantum computing program"
      },
      {
        "position": 3,
        "url": "https://research.google.com/quantum",
        "label": "Google Quantum AI",
        "description": "Google's quantum research"
      }
    ],
    "citationPills": [
      {
        "label": "Wikipedia - Quantum Computing",
        "citationPillId": 1,
        "url": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_computing",
        "domain": "en.wikipedia.org",
        "description": "Quantum computing is a multidisciplinary field...",
        "position": 1
      },
      {
        "label": "Google Quantum AI",
        "citationPillId": 1,
        "url": "https://research.google.com/quantum",
        "domain": "research.google.com",
        "description": "Google's quantum research",
        "position": 3
      }
    ]
  }
}

Overview

ChatGPT

Google

Perplexity

Copilot

AI Mode

Grok

Gemini

Google News

Utilities

Google Gemini 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