# Grounding

URL: https://www.getdynamiq.ai/glossary/grounding

> Tying a model's answer to specific, retrievable source material, so the answer can be traced back to a document rather than training data.

Tying a model's answer to specific, retrievable source material, so the answer can be traced back to a document rather than training data.

Grounding is the practice of giving a model source material to answer from, and having its answer stay tied to that material, rather than to whatever it happened to learn during training. A grounded answer can point to the passage it came from; an ungrounded one can only be checked by an expert who already knows the right answer.

A regulated decision, a coverage determination, a policy interpretation, a compliance finding, needs a source a reviewer can actually check, not a plausible sentence with nothing behind it. Grounding is what makes an AI-generated answer reviewable rather than something to be taken on faith.

An agent answering a question about a refund policy quotes the exact clause and the exact document it came from, so a reviewer can verify the answer in one click rather than re-researching the question from scratch.

**In Dynamiq**, Knowledge Base retrieval and GraphRAG both return the source passages or facts an agent used alongside its answer, guardrail validators can check an output's structure before it reaches a user, and evaluation metrics such as Faithfulness and Context Recall score whether an answer actually reflects what was retrieved, rather than drifting from it.

## See it in Dynamiq

-   [Knowledge](https://www.getdynamiq.ai/product/knowledge-rag)
-   [Guardrails and approvals](https://www.getdynamiq.ai/product/guardrails)

## Related terms

-   [Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG)](https://www.getdynamiq.ai/glossary/retrieval-augmented-generation)
-   [Hallucination](https://www.getdynamiq.ai/glossary/hallucination)
-   [AI guardrails](https://www.getdynamiq.ai/glossary/ai-guardrails)

## See an agent on your own workflow.

Bring a process and its documents. Our engineers will show you how Dynamiq runs it, in your environment or ours.

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