The short answer
A language model writes fluent text from patterns it learned. Asked for your price, it may write a believable number that is wrong. That is often called a hallucination.
Grounding, often built with retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), first retrieves relevant facts from your data and then writes the answer using only those facts. If nothing relevant is found, the right answer is “I don’t know”.
What Anchor does about it
Anchor’s assistants retrieve from your catalog, inventory and orders before answering, keep tenant data separate, and hand off when confidence is low. Answers about prices and stock come from your records.
Limits to know
- Grounding reduces wrong answers; it does not remove them. Data can be missing or stale, so testing and review still matter.
Common questions
- Is RAG the same as grounding?
- RAG is a common technique for grounding: retrieve first, then generate from what was retrieved.
- Can I see where an answer came from?
- Anchor answers from your own catalog and order records, which you can inspect in the dashboard.
Related topics
Updated 2026-09-25. Something unclear or wrong? Tell us.