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Glossary · Answer engines and retrieval

grounding

Constraining a generated answer to retrieved source material.

What grounding does not show

Grounding reduces invention but does not eliminate it: a grounded answer can still misattribute which source said what.

Where grounding comes up on this site

  • Content-Signal in robots.txt: search, ai-input, ai-trainVALUE COVERS IF SET TO NO search index, links, short excerpts dropped from classic results ai-input grounding and live AI answers not quoted in AI answers ai-train training or fine-tuning no effect on reach or citation A signal is a stated preference.

Definitions that name grounding

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Related terms in Answer engines and retrieval

How a generated answer gets made, and what your page is competing for inside it.

AEO · GEO · AI visibility score · share of voice · prompt set · brand mention · RAG · training data · embedding · chunking · context window · token · hallucination · refusal · AI Overview · answer engine · citation · retrieval · hallucinated attribution · Hybrid search · Re-ranking · Passage ranking · Query fan-out · Chunk boundary · BM25 · cross-encoder · AI Mode · information gain · dense retrieval

Questions about grounding

What is grounding?

Constraining a generated answer to retrieved source material.

What does grounding not show or guarantee?

Grounding reduces invention but does not eliminate it: a grounded answer can still misattribute which source said what.

Which area of the glossary does grounding belong to?

Answer engines and retrieval: How a generated answer gets made, and what your page is competing for inside it.

← RAG  ·  training data →

See it in the full glossary · 772 terms across 19 areas.

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