What is Grounding?
Grounding is the practice of tying an AI system's outputs to retrieved evidence, verified sources, tool results, or structured data rather than relying only on model memory.
How It Works
Grounding is central to trustworthy RAG and agent systems. A grounded answer should be supported by evidence the system can inspect, cite, or verify at runtime. This evidence may come from documents, databases, search results, API calls, logs, or user-provided files. Grounding does not guarantee truth by itself: retrieval can be wrong, sources can be stale, and models can still misinterpret evidence. But without grounding, generated answers are much harder to audit, correct, and trust.
Key Characteristics
- Connects generated output to inspectable evidence or tool results
- Reduces but does not eliminate hallucination risk
- Requires reliable retrieval, source freshness, and citation or trace support
- Can use documents, databases, APIs, search results, logs, or structured records
- Important for regulated, enterprise, medical, legal, and financial AI workflows
Common Use Cases
- Generating RAG answers with citations to source passages
- Answering enterprise questions from permission-filtered knowledge bases
- Using API results rather than model memory for current account status
- Auditing agent decisions with retrieved evidence and tool traces
- Reducing unsupported claims in compliance or policy assistants
Example
Loading code...Frequently Asked Questions
Does grounding eliminate hallucinations?
No. It reduces hallucination risk by providing evidence, but the system can still retrieve the wrong source or misread the right one.
Is RAG the only way to ground an AI system?
No. Tool calls, database queries, search results, user-uploaded files, and structured records can also ground responses.
What makes grounding auditable?
The system should preserve source identifiers, quotes, offsets, timestamps, tool inputs, and tool outputs so claims can be traced.
How is grounding different from citation?
Grounding is the broader practice of using evidence. Citation is one way to expose that evidence to users.