Grounding

What is Grounding?

Grounding means tying an AI's answer to specific, checkable documents instead of letting it answer purely from what it memorized during training. In practice that means retrieving sources, handing them to the model, and instructing it to stick to them and cite them. It's the main defense against fabricated claims, though it doesn't remove them entirely: a grounded model can still summarize a correct source badly. For a brand, grounding is exactly why being present in the sources is what really decides the outcome.

Related terms

RAG

Searching for documents before answering and writing from what was found.

Hallucination

A claim an AI states as fact that isn't true.

Source

Each page an answer engine retrieved and used to write its answer.

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