Citation
The definition as the field writes it comes first, weaknesses and all. What Entity Bind does about it comes last, in its own paragraph, so you can take one without the other. Filed under decisions and evidence.
What the system returns, what it refuses to return, and what a decision can be redeemed for afterwards.
every figure, with its population →What citation means
A citation is a pointer somebody else can follow: the register, the specific record, the field, the retrieval timestamp and, where the source permits it, a URL a reader can open. 'Companies House' on its own is an attribution rather than a citation. The difference is whether a sceptical person can check the claim without asking you for help.
Citations do most of their work in the awkward cases. When a resolver contradicts an incumbent's proposed match, the citation is the whole argument; without it the contradiction is one vendor's opinion against another's. When an agent acts on a resolution, the citation is what a later reviewer uses to establish whether the action was reasonable on the evidence available at the time.
There is a caveat specific to research over live web sources: cited content is untrusted input. A fetched page can contain text designed to influence a model reading it, so citations should be constrained to what they can support — identity evidence, not instructions — and the fetched material should be fenced as data rather than treated as part of the prompt.
Entity Bind returns citations with resolved records and with research-stage evidence, fences fetched content as data with its closing tag stripped, constrains findings to an allow-list that deliberately excludes registration identifiers, and ranks web observations below the caller's own facts in precedence. A residual risk remains: a poisoned page can push a genuinely borderline verdict into human review.
Where this shows up in Entity Bind
Three pages where this term stops being vocabulary and starts changing an answer, a payload or a price.
- Register coverageThe registers the resolver reads, the licence each one publishes under, and how often a live entity's name is unique once it is tidied to a common form.Open
- The audit packThe fixtures, the verdict logs and the replay path: what an evaluator needs to re-run a published rate for themselves.Open
- Reference dataIdentifier crosswalks, where each fact came from, and what a cited fact has to carry to be usable downstream.Open
The fastest way past a definition is a file: which of your rows are the same company, which of your existing matches we would not have made, and what we could not decide.
Start freeThe terms next to this one
Each with its own sentence, because the next question is usually about the word beside this one.
Provenance
Provenance is the record of where each individual value came from — which source, retrieved when, effective when — attached to the value itself rather than to the dataset as a whole.
Decision receipt
A decision receipt is the durable, retrievable record of why a particular match was made — the features, the probability, the thresholds in force, the sources cited and the version of the pipeline that decided — addressable by an identifier returned with the answer.
Temporal facts
A temporal fact is a value stored with the period over which it was true and the history of when it was observed, rather than as a single current value that silently overwrites its predecessor.
Abstention
An abstention is a first-class 'we do not know' returned instead of a match: the record comes back unresolved, with a ranked shortlist, a typed reason and the column that would have decided it.
Licence tier
A licence tier is the classification carried by an individual fact that determines what may lawfully be done with it — stored, redistributed, resold, or only shown once to the caller who asked.
The other 8 terms on this shelf
What the system returns, what it refuses to return, and what a decision can be redeemed for afterwards.
Internal fixtures only. The historical 2026-08-29 per-tier recording covers 317 GB companies with identifier-rich arrivals seeding the catalogue first; the context tier includes country and registered-town prose. Its legacy replay has no full-prompt-verified calls and cannot certify current calibration. The September 5 CI reports cover 1,176 labelled pairs and 705 records over 250 companies using offline stubs. These are not independent customer holdouts or live production validation; the 99% minimum-input product target remains unmet. Scope is company and organisation identity only — not people, vessels, bank-account ownership, sanctions or emissions. Results may not be used for eligibility decisions about individuals, including employment, credit and tenancy.
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