Perplexity citation pills schema

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. For use cases, pricing context, and copy-paste examples, see the Perplexity citations 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

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

Field	Type	Description
`label`	string	Per-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.
`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 Perplexity 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://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
      }
    ]
  }
}

Overview

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Utilities

Perplexity 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