What is grounding in AI?
Grounding means tying an AI model's answers to specific, trusted sources, such as your website, documents or product data, so it replies from those facts instead of from what it remembers from training.
Also called: AI grounding, grounded generation, source grounding.
By Santhul Joseph, AI EngineerUpdated
How grounding works
- You decide which sources count: web pages, PDFs, product data, Q&As.
- When a question comes in, the system finds the passages that relate to it, usually with vector search.
- Those passages go to the model together with the question.
- The model is instructed to answer from them, and to say so when they don't hold the answer.
Why it matters
An ungrounded model answers like a well-read stranger: often right in general, often wrong about your business. Grounding makes the answer about your shop, clinic or agency, and fixing an answer becomes a content edit, not a technical project.
Grounding is only as good as the content behind it. If your return policy isn't in the sources, the agent can't answer from it, so finding the gaps matters as much as the model.
Grounding in SimplyBoost
Every SimplyBoost agent is grounded in the knowledge you add: a whole website, single pages or a sitemap, PDFs including scanned ones, Word files, .txt, CSV, images, text snippets, Q&A pairs, and Shopify policies and pages.
All of these are available on every plan, with files up to 50 MB each and no limit on the number of files. Missing answers shows you what your sources didn't cover yet.
Questions people ask
Is grounding the same as RAG?
RAG is the most common way to ground a model. Grounding is the goal, answers tied to trusted sources, and retrieval-augmented generation is the method that fetches those sources at the moment the model answers.
Does grounding make an AI chatbot always right?
It makes it far more reliable, but it still depends on your sources. Outdated or missing content leads to outdated or missing answers, so keep sources current and check the questions it couldn't answer.
What happens to a grounded agent when my website changes?
In SimplyBoost, website pages are read when you add them. After a bigger change to your site, add the changed pages again so the agent answers from the new version.