How to Remove Citations or References from Responses ?

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Posted on by CU11122104-0

I’m facing an issue where I want to remove citations or references (e.g., "[1]") from the agent's response generated using the knowledge sources. I tried addressing this by modifying the Conversational Boosting topic to preprocess the response, but it doesn't seem to trigger. Even after disabling all topics, the agent continues to pull responses directly from the documents added in the knowledge section.

Key Question:
Is there any way to intercept and modify the response before it appears on the UI? Specifically, I’m looking for a solution to preprocess the response to remove references or citations.

Any suggestions or insights would be highly appreciated!

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Artur Stepniak 1,539 Moderator on at

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Hello,

you need to first save the bot response to a variable and uncheck send message, see:

That way you'd be able to edit the response before sending it to the user.

In case of any other questions, let me know. If the answer helped you, mark it, so that others can benefit from it.

Best regards,

Artur Stepniak
fchopo 8,003 Moderator on at

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Hello,

Please, watch this excellent video by @dewainr on how to remove citations in Copilot Studio: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X0GohdAIuJQ where generated answer is intercepted and modified.

Hope it helps!

Ferran
Sebbi3 43 on at

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@fchopo I watched the entire video and it didn't show how to remove citations or references from responses.
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Vinoth Selvam 1,597 Super User 2025 Season 1 on at

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Hi CU11122104-0,

I believe there are no Straight forward options to just turn off or modify the Citations. But it is possible thought some custom steps.

If you can check any topics or even conversational boosting, the response that is generated from the 'Generative answers' will have any option to Display the message to user (or) to Store it in a variable.

We need to store the response in a variable instead of dirctly displaying. Next step, when you parse that variable, you will be able to see the message text stored in a separate variable and link is separate.

You can just have a Message node to display the text value only (Variable.Text).

In this way, you will be able to prevent or modify the citation from displaying in the response.

Thanks.
For Copilot studio technical blogs: Visit my Site
Sebbi3 43 on at

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@Vinoth Selvam This worked perfectly however, when the bot responds it still provides the number reference/citation of where its getting the content from with the numbers like this [1] [2] [3].

How would we remove this from the response to give it a clean look?
NL-20120333-0 2 on at

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I was able to remove the leftover [1][2] by adding a set variable value node. I hovered the fx field so you can see and copy the code. If anybody else has a better code snippet please let me know!
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Romain The Low-Code... 2,898 Super User 2026 Season 2 on at

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Hello,

did you try by using the dedicated topic wich trigger just before a message is display ? it allow to modifie references, content, and the message before being display :)

1 : change the trigger to AI response is about to be send

2 : edit the citation and answer :)

if this solve the case please mark the answer as verified it's important for the community and search engine