Shipped: grounded-summary export with inline sources
The export path customers have asked for since month one. Executive summary exports now carry the inline citations as hyperlinks in the DOCX and PDF outputs, with an appendix that lists every evidence source in order.
We shipped grounded-summary export with inline sources this week. This is the smallest-sounding change on the roadmap and the one customers have asked for since month one. Until now, the executive summary produced in the drafting tool carried inline citations on screen but stripped them on export, leaving the downloaded DOCX or PDF with only the prose. Reviewers who wanted to verify a claim had to cross-reference the draft tool and the exported file — which meant most of them didn’t.
The change is two pieces.
Inline hyperlinks in the export. Every claim in the exported summary carries the same citation badge the on-screen draft shows, rendered as a hyperlink in DOCX and as a bracketed reference in PDF. Click a citation in the DOCX and you land on the source block in the evidence vault. The PDF version uses a bracketed footnote number tied to the appendix.
An evidence appendix. Every exported summary now has an appended “Sources” section listing each cited block in the order it appears, with the block label, the originating document, the version, and the extraction date. A reviewer can read the summary top-to-bottom and verify each claim in a single pass, without leaving the file.
The behavior is on by default for new drafts. For drafts in progress, toggle “Include inline citations in export” in the export dialog. Existing drafts do not migrate automatically — re-export to get the new behavior.
Two notes on what this does and does not do. It does not change how the summary is drafted; the citation data was always there, we just stopped rendering it on export. It does make reviewer audit time drop measurably — we watched three customer reviewers use the feature during beta and the median “find the source for this claim” time went from two minutes to six seconds. It also makes the submitted proposal itself more credible, because every claim is anchored visibly for the evaluator.
A note on why this took longer than it should have. The feature looked like a simple export change, but the path between the in-app citation metadata and the exported file ran through three different rendering layers — the in-editor model, the PDF engine, and the DOCX engine — each of which had its own link conventions. We rebuilt the intermediate representation so that every citation carries the same structured payload regardless of the final format. That rebuild is what most of the engineering time went to; the feature on top of it was a weekend.
The pattern has come up on other features too. When the exported artifact is the one the customer trusts, the export path is load-bearing infrastructure, not an afterthought. The same intermediate representation that made this feature possible will pay for itself the next two times we ship an export option.
Docs: /platform/grounded-ai#export has the full list of export options and the new citation render modes. Customers in the beta noted that the DOCX-hyperlink render had different behavior in Word versus Google Docs; both work, with a small styling difference that is documented. The team that requested this feature hardest knows who they are — thanks for the persistence.