Grounding
Grounding explained
A grounded system shows its work: links, footnotes, or an internal chain from claim to passage. Perplexity and AI Overviews are visibly grounded. Chat assistants are grounded only when they choose to search, which is why the same question can produce a sourced answer one day and a memory based answer the next.
For a brand, grounding is leverage. If a system will only assert what it can source, then publishing sourceable facts is how you control the narrative. Numbers, dates, named people, methodology and prices are all easy to ground. Adjectives are not.
Write pages that a grounded system can lean on: one claim per block, a fact next to it, and a date on the page.
Grounding is the practice of tying a generated answer to specific retrieved sources so the claims in it can be traced back to something real.
One definition is worth more than ten opinions
Every term here links to the service that owns the work and the tool that measures it.
Read next
Three things you can test this week
None of these need a tool or a vendor. They take an afternoon and they tell you whether grounding is actually your problem.
Our own measurement method, with its definitions and stated limits, is published on the method page.
The definition is the easy part
Knowing what a term means takes five minutes. Knowing whether it is your problem takes an afternoon, and knowing what to do about it takes a method.
Every glossary page here ends with three checks you can run yourself and the primary sources behind them, because a definition you cannot act on is trivia.
Primary sources
Primary documentation for the mechanics described on this page. All published by the organisations that operate the systems in question.
Twenty buying prompts, four engines, you against three named competitors. Report in one working day. No call needed.
Grounding: common questions
Why do sourced answers vary between engines?
Each retrieves from a different index with different freshness and different trust weighting.
Does adding statistics help?
Yes, when they are yours and clearly attributed. Original data is the most citable content a brand can publish.
Do dates matter?
Visibly. Undated pages lose to dated ones on anything that looks time sensitive.
See what the engines say about you
Twenty buying prompts, four engines, your brand against three named competitors. Report in one working day.
- 20 buying prompts, your category
- ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, AI Overviews
- You against three named competitors
- Report in one working day, yours to keep