SEP-3094: Granular Citations Format - #3094
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Proposes a standard for MCP servers and clients to exchange granular, verifiable citations using Web Annotation selectors, citationRefs, and schema.org metadata on citation targets. Co-authored-by: Cursor <cursoragent@cursor.com>
Replace the preamble code block with template bullet fields so render-seps places SEP-3094 under Draft instead of Unknown. Co-authored-by: Cursor <cursoragent@cursor.com>
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…rences to old initialize handshake to _meta Co-authored-by: Cursor <cursoragent@cursor.com>
Co-authored-by: Cursor <cursoragent@cursor.com>
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SEP: Granular citations format
Many popular MCP clients (e.g. ChatGPT, Copilot) have bespoke formats for MCP servers to return rich citations.
Other popular MCP clients (e.g. Claude) only render citation chips from first-party features such as public web
search, making responses from MCP servers appear less trustworthy. Citations are an important mechanism for
professionals and academic researchers to verify the accuracy of LLM-generated responses.
This SEP proposes standardizing a mechanism for MCP servers and clients to exchange granular, verifiable
citations to resources or portions of resources — sentences, HTML elements, image regions, table rows. It reuses
existing MCP and web standards for selectors and fragments, such as MCP resource URIs, a subset of the W3C Web Annotation Data Model, and schema.org citations. It explicitly tries to avoid creating bespoke formats that have not gone
through rigorous review and real world usage.
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