The Three-Source Rule for AI-Written Research

You ask Cowork to research a market-sizing number for a board deck. A minute later it hands you a clean answer with a citation right next to the figure. You copy the number, you copy the link, you drop both into slide four. Done.

In the meeting, someone asks where the number came from. You open the link. It's a vendor's own marketing page, citing a survey they ran, with no methodology. The figure is probably directional, but "probably directional" is not what you implied when you put it on a slide with a citation.

The tool didn't lie to you. Cowork did exactly what you asked: it found a source and showed it to you. The citation was real. What it couldn't do, what no citation does, is tell you the source was good.

That's the gap this article closes, and it takes one habit, not a software change.

#A citation proves provenance, not truth

Cowork's research mode is genuinely strong here: it returns answers with inline citations you can click to see where each claim came from. That is a real, documented capability, and it's the thing that makes verification possible at all.