Where does Research get its answers?

Last updated: August 17, 2026

Quick Answer

Research answers your prompts from two sources: Pursuit's internal store of government documents, and the public web. Every run searches dozens of candidate documents from the document store and cites the specific sources it used, which you can open from the Sources tab in any result cell. Web plus Documents runs use both sources, and documents-only runs stay inside Pursuit's document store.

What This Is

Pursuit maintains a document store of government source material: solicitations, budgets, board minutes, contracts and other public records. When an AI column runs, Research retrieves the documents most likely to answer your prompt, reads them, and builds the answer from what it finds. The web is the second source, used for anything the document store does not cover, such as recent news or a vendor page.

How It Works

Retrieval

Each run pulls dozens of candidate documents from the document store and evaluates them against your prompt. Runs that stay inside Pursuit documents are much more likely to surface the exact passage that answers the question than they were before August 2026.

Citations

Every answer carries its sources. Open a result cell and select the Sources tab to see the reasoning and links to the documents used for that row. More documents searched means more citations available on the answer.

Choosing your sources

Set the source mix on the prompt panel when you create or edit an AI column.

  • Use Pursuit documents only when the answer has to come from an authoritative government record, for example contract values, renewal dates or budget line items

  • Use Web plus Documents when you want the document store plus current web context, for example leadership changes or recent coverage

What It Doesn't Do

Research does not invent an answer when the sources are silent. If neither the document store nor the web contains the answer for a row, the cell says so rather than filling in a guess.

Next Step

See Creating a custom AI prompt to write a prompt and choose its sources.