Grounding is the practice of tying a generated answer to specific retrieved sources so that its claims can be traced back to a document.
Grounded systems retrieve first and generate from what they retrieved, often surfacing citations alongside the answer.
Grounding vs. accuracy
A grounded answer is anchored to a source. If the source is wrong, the answer is confidently wrong and fully traceable.
Grounding improves traceability and reduces invention. It does not adjudicate between sources.
Why it matters
Grounding rewards whoever supplies the clearest source document on a given question.
That is a competition, and most vendors are not entered in it. They have published a great deal of material about themselves and very little that directly answers the questions their buyers are actually asking a machine.
Related: Retrieval corpus · Hallucinated attribution · Machine-readable claim
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