Web search citations missing when upgrading to gpt-5-mini from gpt-4.1-mini

API Bugs
1

I noticed when updating my code to point to gpt-5-mini from gpt-4.1-mini all of the citation links that were rendered properly using gpt-4.1-mini are no longer working. There is what appears to be an internal citation of where to inject the citation but its missing?

This is the python code for the responses call. Only line I am changing is the model from 4.1 to 5

    # Determine if web search should be enabled
    tools = [{"type": "web_search_preview"}] if not persona_cfg.get('disable_web_search', False) else []

    # Structured output schema for the poll
    POLL_SCHEMA = {
        "type": "object",
        "properties": {
            "question":   { "type": "string", "maxLength": 250 },
            "options":    {
                "type":  "array",
                "items": { "type": "string" },
                "minItems": 2,
                "maxItems": 5
            },
            "description": { "type": "string", "maxLength": 5000 }
        },
        "required": ["question", "options", "description"],
        "additionalProperties": False

    }

    response = client.responses.create(
        model="gpt-4.1-mini",
        tools=tools,              
        input=prompt,
        text = {
            "format": {
                "type": "json_schema",
                "name": "poll",
                "schema": POLL_SCHEMA,
                "strict": True
            }
        }   
    )

    output_text = response.output_text
    print(response)
    print(f"Output text: {output_text}")

Both calls succeed however, I see these markers: \ue200cite\ue202turn0search3\ue201 , \ue200cite\ue202turn0academia8\ue201, \ue200cite\ue202turn2search0\ue202turn0news12\ue201, etc. everywhere in the gpt-5-mini output compared to them being non existent in the gpt-4.1-mini output. The gpt-5-mini includes no links but the gpt-4.1-mini correctly embeds the links as markdown for rendering

Any suggestions here? My assumption is its something with the structured output limiting the models ability to inject the correct citation?

2

I’m seeing the same - not 100% of the time, but fairly often. I plan to experiment with a system prompt update to try to avoid these - has anyone had any success with this yet?

3

Yeah, that’s expected with mini gpt 5 It’s outputting the raw citation markers instead of markdown links, likely because of the JSON schema forcing strict formatting. Easiest workaround is to either loosen the schema or post-process those markers into links yourself.

4

Got it - what do you recommend for loosening the schema? Do I just need to remove the strict: True? Do you have more documentation on this that I could reference? Post processing the citation links seems tougher to do then I’d like