Grounding
Grounding means tying an AI's answer to specific, checkable sources — search results, documents, a database — and ideally showing them. Grounded answers are easier to verify and less likely to be invented.
In one line, for a 12-year-old
Grounding is the AI showing where it got its answer, like a bibliography.
An example
Our Dispatches are written only from named outlets' reporting, and every claim links to the source it came from.
Why it matters to people
A citation is only useful if you open it: AI tools sometimes cite real pages that don't actually say what was claimed.