AI Dictionary › Prompting

Grounding

Grounding is the practice of anchoring model responses to specific, verified sources instead of its general knowledge, by providing relevant documents in the prompt ("answer ONLY based on the attached contract") or via RAG systems that retrieve them automatically.

Definition

It is the main defense against hallucinations in professional contexts: the model shouldn't "remember" your company policy, it should read and cite it. Typical grounding instructions: "use only the information provided", "if the answer isn't in the documents, say so", "cite the exact passage for every claim".

Citing sources is the natural complement: asking the model to state where each piece of information comes from makes the output verifiable and turns the AI from an opaque oracle into an auditable work tool.

Related terms

• RAG (Retrieval Augmented Generation)
• AI Hallucination
• Context (in prompting)
• Embedding
• Constraints (in prompting)

More in Prompting

• Prompt
• Prompting
• Role Assignment
• Zero-shot
• Few-shot
• Chain of Thought
• Prompt Engineering
• Output Format

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