Grounding
In one line
Grounding is the practice of anchoring an LLM's answer to external evidence — retrieved documents, search results, structured data — to push factual accuracy higher.
Going deeper
Grounding is the umbrella term for techniques that force an LLM to lean on outside evidence — retrieved documents, live search, structured data — instead of relying on its training memory. RAG is the canonical pattern, and citation-based AI search is grounding in disguise.
Why marketers care: if your content is not in the pool the model grounds against, accurate citations are impossible. You want clean facts on your own site and consistent information on external surfaces — Wikipedia, press, reviews — so the grounding result stabilises.
Grounding is not a silver bullet. If sources are wrong or out of date, the answer follows them. Models also paraphrase sources in ways that subtly drift. Periodically auditing how the AI grounds claims about your brand is part of running a GEO program.
Related terms
Hallucination
Hallucination is when an LLM produces confidently-stated information that is simply wrong — and it is one of the biggest threats to citation accuracy in GEO.
GEO·AEOSource Attribution
Source attribution is the way AI answers expose where the information came from — citation cards, footnotes or inline links that let users verify the claim and click through.
GEO·AEOCitation Rate
Citation rate is the share of a defined prompt set in which an AI answer cites your brand or domain — the headline KPI of GEO.
GEO·AEOLLMO
LLMO (Large Language Model Optimization) is the work of shaping content, data and context signals so that LLMs understand and cite your brand correctly.
SEOKnowledge Graph
A knowledge graph is a database of entities — people, brands, products — and their relationships, used by search engines and LLMs as the factual backbone of their answers.
How does your brand show up in AI answers?
Villion measures how your brand appears across ChatGPT, Perplexity and AI Overviews, then automates the work that lifts citation rate and share of voice.
Get a free audit