The synthesis agent receives summarized findings from the web-search and document-analysis agents, then passes a...

Option B preserves provenance as structured data throughout every handoff. Each finding should include the summarized claim and an associated source record containing its URL or document identifier, page or section location, relevant excerpt, and possibly retrieval date and confidence. The synthesis agent can combine claims without destroying this relationship, and the report generator can produce citations deterministically.

Anthropic’s multi-agent research system retains findings until a dedicated citation stage identifies the precise source locations supporting report claims. This demonstrates that citation provenance must remain available beyond initial retrieval and summarization.

Option A attempts to reconstruct provenance after it has been discarded, which is expensive and may associate a claim with a different or weaker source. Option C preserves evidence but wastes context by transferring approximately all raw search and document content. Option D is better than losing references entirely, but embedding citations only in prose makes programmatic validation, deduplication, and claim-to-source mapping less reliable. Structured content and source fields maintain both context efficiency and auditable attribution while allowing different agents to transform the narrative safely.

================