Grounded answers

• You need auditability for compliance, health, finance, or enterprise deals.
• Support or onboarding flows must reference specific docs or policies.
• Hallucinations are causing churn or high ticket volume.

Grounding increases trust and reduces escalations. PMs decide how strictly to enforce grounding—too strict and the model refuses harmless questions; too loose and risk returns. Grounding also influences UI (citations, source badges) and metrics like deflection rate and NPS.

Require sources for critical claims, limit to top citations, and show them clearly in the UI. Reject outputs without support and offer fallback flows. In 2026, run automatic grounding checks in your eval harness and log source coverage to track drift as the corpus changes.

An onboarding helper shows two cited links per answer. After enforcing grounding, false-positive answers drop 60% and support tickets about “confusing guidance” fall 22% while response time stays under 1.4 s.

• Allowing unsupported statements in regulated contexts.
• Overwhelming users with long citation lists that bury the key source.
• Not updating citations when content changes, causing stale guidance.