Our stance.

Published September 24, 2026 — this page states what itclicks refuses to do, and what it promises instead. It changes only if either one does.

Ask a general-purpose AI assistant a question with more than one part to it, and watch what happens: it takes several separate facts, pulled from different places, and folds them into one confident-sounding sentence. If there are citations at all, they get attached loosely — a footnote at the end, a source list underneath — but nothing tells you which specific claim came from which specific source. Four facts. One sentence. One blended answer.

We call that “Smoothing.”

Smoothing isn't a bug. It's what happens when a system is built to sound complete rather than to stay checkable. It reads well. It sounds sure of itself. And there's no way, from inside that sentence, to tell where any one piece of it actually came from.

itclicks refuses to do that.

If a question has four separate answers folded into it, itclicks gives you four separate points — one at a time, each one holding its own source, each one you can check before you move to the next. That's slower and more deliberate than getting one smooth paragraph back. It's an intentional tradeoff: the moment itclicks starts merging separate facts into one confident sentence just to feel faster, it's no longer checkable — and it's no longer itclicks.

That's the whole stance. The pacing, the sourcing, the refusal to guess when nothing checks out — all of it comes from that one line.

We didn't coin the problem

We named it “smoothing” for plain English, but the pattern itself is documented and measured. Three places that back this up, in their words, not ours: