Cited network paths — how entities connect

The cited path explainer answers one question: "how do these two entities connect?" Give it a start entity and a destination entity, and it returns the ordered chain of nodes between them, the relationship on each hop, and the source record(s) that establish each hop.

Cited paths are a Team-and-above capability. (The FedGrade Network graph itself opens at Pro with depth 1; path explanations start at Team.)

What you get back

An explained path is the node sequence from start to destination, with, for every hop:

• the relationship that links the two nodes — one of the graph's edge kinds, such as won (a vendor won an award from an agency) or partnered_with (vendor teaming or co-occurrence), and
• the source record id(s) that establish that hop.

Only won and partnered_with edges are populated today, so paths are built from those two relationships.

Fully cited by contract

The path-finder skips uncited hops: every hop in a returned path is backed by a source record. You will never get a path that asserts a connection FedGrade can't point to a record for. If no fully cited path exists within the hop budget, you get nothing rather than a speculative chain.

Using it

• Set the start and destination entities and an optional maximum number of hops (1–6, default 4). Your tier's depth limit also applies.
• Over HTTP at GET /api/network/path?from=…&to=…&maxHops=… (signed-in, Team and above).
• As part of the query_entity_graph MCP tool, which walks an entity's relationship paths with the source behind each edge.

Honest limits

The graph is a public-source aggregate. A path can only exist if the connecting relationships were observed in public data — private teaming agreements are not represented. partnered_with hops derived from co-occurrence are heuristic: treat them as a signal, not a fact.