Learning path · Production RAG · 52
Citation and Grounding
Requiring answers to quote or link retrieved evidence—and refusing when support is insufficient.
Why it matters
- Trust and compliance depend on traceable sources.
- Reduces undetected hallucination in enterprise QA.
- UX must show citations users can verify.
Key ideas
- Inline citations
- Abstention
- Evidence spans
Grounding policies instruct the model to tie claims to chunk IDs or URLs, use direct quotes for numbers, and say "I don't know" when retrieval misses. Validate automatically: NLI models or LLM judges compare answers to passages. User interfaces should surface citations prominently—not footnotes users never expand. Grounding is a product requirement, not a prompt afterthought. Train support staff to click citations during QA shifts; broken anchors erode trust faster than occasional wrong answers. Ship only after eval gates pass on representative production failures.
Updated 2026-08-09 · Full learning path