How engines work
Grounding
Grounding is tying a model's answer to specific retrieved sources rather than to its own recollection. A grounded answer can be traced back to documents, which is what makes citations possible and answers more reliable.
In more detail
The visible trace of grounding is the citation list. When an answer carries sources, the brands in it were usually chosen from what those sources said.
Guides that cover this
Related terms
Retrieval-augmented generation
Retrieval-augmented generation is when a model searches for relevant documents and writes its answer from what it finds, rather than from training alone. It is why a page published this week can appear in an answer today.
Citation
A citation is a link an answer engine attaches to its response to show where information came from. Citations reveal which sources shaped the answer, which makes them the clearest signal of what to work on.
Hallucination
A hallucination is a confident statement from a model that is not supported by its sources — a wrong price, a feature attributed to the wrong company, an outdated fact stated as current.
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