Grounding
Grounding is the difference between an assistant that knows your business and one that has read a great deal about businesses in general.
Why it matters
Without grounding, an assistant answers questions about your company from general patterns about companies. It will be fluent, reasonable, and wrong about anything specific — which is everything a customer actually asks.
- Answers that describe a generic version of your business
- Policies that sound right and match nothing you published
- No way to trace where an answer came from
How grounding is enforced
Relevant passages are retrieved and supplied as the material to answer from, with instructions to use only that material and to decline otherwise. The retrieved passages then become the citation, which makes grounding externally checkable rather than a claim.
Grounding and refusal are the same mechanism
If an assistant may only answer from supplied material, then a question with no relevant material has no answer available. Refusal is not a separate safety feature bolted on; it is what grounding does when the content is not there.
How to verify it
Check citations rather than answers. A correct answer citing an unrelated page means the answer came from somewhere other than the retrieved material, and the next question will not be so lucky.
Common questions
- How do I know an answer is grounded?
- It carries a citation, and that citation actually contains the claim. Open the source on a sample of answers — an answer whose cited page does not support it is not grounded, whatever the interface implies.
- Does grounding make answers worse?
- It makes them narrower, which is the point. A grounded assistant will decline questions a general one would happily answer, and that is the trade you are making deliberately.
From the blog
All posts- EvaluatingWhat a citation should prove (and what most of them don’t)Citations look like grounding. Many are just related links. Here is the two-check test — resolves, and contains the claim — and what fails it.Read
- EvaluatingBuild vs buy for website support (without the usual trap)Build vs buy for a website support assistant is really a question about who owns crawl, refusal, handoff, and the content loop — not who can wrap an API first.Read
- BuildingGrounding without the mystiqueStrip the jargon and grounding is simple — supply the passages, require the model to use them, refuse when they are missing. Here is how to check it is actually happening.Read
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