Right — search engines have long had authority scoring, link graphs, freshness signals, etc.

The interesting gap is that retrieval systems used in LLM pipelines often don't inherit those signals in a structured way. They fetch documents, but the model sees text, not provenance metadata or confidence scores.

So even if the ranking system “knows” a source is weak, that signal doesn’t necessarily survive into generation.

Maybe the harder problem isn’t retrieval, but how to propagate source trust signals all the way into the claim itself.