What is Grounding?
Grounding means constraining an AI answer to specific retrieved evidence, so that every statement can be traced to a passage in a known source. An ungrounded answer is generated from model memory alone and cannot be verified.
Also known as: grounded answers, source-grounded AI.
Grounding is enforced, not requested. Strong systems pass only retrieved passages into the prompt, require the model to cite passage identifiers, and refuse to answer when retrieval returns nothing relevant. A refusal is a feature: it is the honest outcome when the knowledge base does not contain the answer.
How Uthereal handles it
Cortex answers carry passage-level citations with document, page and section, and return an explicit no-answer when the evidence is missing.
Related reading
Last updated 2026-09-18 · plain-text glossary for AI tools