Grounding
Grounding is tying an answer to real fetched sources rather than letting the model answer from memory.
In a little more detail
A grounded answer can be checked, because the pages it came from are named. This is the mechanism that makes your own website matter: it is one of the sources that can do the grounding.
Related terms
- Retrieval: Retrieval is the step where AI search fetches live web pages in the middle of answering you, instead of relying only on what it already knows.
- Citation: A citation is a link or source name AI search shows next to its answer to indicate where a piece of information came from.
- Hallucination: A hallucination is AI search stating something false with the same confidence it states something true.
See it on your own site
The scan reads your site the way AI search does and reports where you stand on this and sixteen other checks.