Comparison
SourceBacked vs. ChatGPT for documents
ChatGPT is a genuinely good general-purpose assistant, and you can paste a document into it. It just wasn't built specifically to cite its source every time, or to say so when it doesn't have enough to answer. That's the specific, narrow thing SourceBacked is built around.
| Capability | ChatGPT | SourceBacked |
|---|---|---|
| Answer a question about an uploaded document | ||
| Citation to the exact page or passage, every answer, structurally enforced | ||
| See exactly which excerpts were retrieved, not just trust the answer | — | |
| Says so when there isn't enough in the document to answer, instead of guessing | ||
| One-click summary, FAQ, quiz, pro/con, contract analysis, and draft, same structure every time | — | |
| Team workspaces with per-tenant document isolation | — | |
| Ask across every document in a workspace at once, cited per document |
“Partial” means it depends on how you prompt it each time and isn't structurally guaranteed, not that it's never possible.
Questions
- Isn't this just a wrapper around a language model?
- The model does the writing, same as any AI product built on one. What it doesn't do on its own is force a citation contract: retrieve only from your documents, generate only from what was retrieved, map every claim back to a specific excerpt, and refuse to guess when nothing relevant was found. That's the part SourceBacked is actually built around.
- Could I build this myself with a custom GPT or a prompt?
- You can get partway there with a good system prompt asking for citations. What's harder to replicate with prompting alone is the retrieval layer underneath it (chunking with page provenance, hybrid keyword and meaning-based search scoped to your documents) and a hard rule that a citation is only ever built from the excerpts actually retrieved, never generated by the model as text.