Key Takeaways
- Treat every sentence an assistant says as a claim that needs backing. A grounded answer is built from passages the assistant retrieved, and each statement in it is supposed to be supported by one of them. Anything it cannot back tends to be softened or dropped.
- Write the whole claim in one place. If your city is in the about section, your audience is on the services page and your format is in the FAQ, no single passage says who you are. Put all of it in the opening lines.
- Get the small facts exactly right. Google's grounding check treats a claim with one wrong detail, such as a date, as unsupported. An old price or a stale year can cost you the whole sentence, not just the detail.
- Make each passage readable on its own. A passage that starts with "As mentioned above" or leans on a heading for its meaning loses that meaning once it is lifted out. Name the subject again in the sentence itself.
- Do not expect grounding to pick you. Grounding decides what an answer can say about the pages it found. Whether your page is found in the first place is a separate step, and it is covered in the posts linked below.
Your website says you are an executive coach. It also says you live in Denver, that you work with new managers, and that sessions happen over video. All four facts are true, all four are published, and an AI assistant still describes you in vague terms, or not at all.
What is grounding in AI search, and why does it matter here? Grounding is how an assistant ties each thing it says to a passage it actually read. It works one claim at a time, and it reads your page in pieces, not as a whole.
Here is the short answer, then how an answer is checked claim by claim, why the parts of a claim need to sit together, the small facts that sink a whole sentence, and what grounding does not do for you.
What is grounding in AI search?
Grounding in AI search is tying each statement in an answer to a specific passage the assistant retrieved, so the statement can be traced and checked. A grounded assistant is supposed to say only what its passages support, and leave out what they do not.
Why some answers show their sources and others do not is its own question, answered in what is grounding, and why some AI answers cite sources. This post is about the next step: once your page has been found, what does a grounded answer need from the way it is written?
How an answer is checked, claim by claim
A grounded answer is checked one claim at a time, and a claim is usually one sentence. That is how Google describes its own grounding check for developers: each claim is scored against the source facts, and every claim has to be supported by one or more of them.
Anthropic's documentation for citations in Claude works at the same scale. Plain text documents are split into sentences, and Claude can cite a single sentence or chain several consecutive sentences together. The unit that gets quoted is small.
Both are tools for developers, not a description of how ChatGPT or Gemini answer your buyers, and the consumer products do not publish their checks in this detail. But they show what "grounded" means to the people who build these systems: a sentence in the answer, matched to a passage in a source. That is the standard worth writing for.
The passage comes from somewhere first. How an assistant fetches pages before it writes is covered in what is retrieval-augmented generation. For this post, the important part is that it fetches passages, not your whole site.
Why the parts of a claim need to sit together
The parts of a claim need to sit together because an assistant retrieves passages, and a passage that states only one part cannot back the whole sentence. A claim about you usually has several parts: what you do, where, for whom, and how.
The claim an answer would make "An executive coach in Denver who works with new managers over video."
Page as written
- Opening lines Executive coach
- Services New managers
- About me Denver
- FAQ Over video
Four passages, one part each
Page rewritten
- Opening lines Executive coachDenverNew managersOver video
- Services other detail
- About me other detail
- FAQ other detail
One passage, all four parts
Same four facts on both pages. Only one page has a passage that can back the whole sentence.
The example is illustrative, and the left-hand page is extremely common. Nothing on it is missing and nothing is wrong. It is simply written the way people read a website, top to bottom, trusting the reader to carry the city from the about section to the services section.
An assistant does not carry it. It may retrieve the services passage for a question about new managers and never see the about section at all. Google's own guide to AI features in Search describes a "query fan-out" that issues several related searches across subtopics, and each search can land on a different piece of your page.
The fix is one sentence, placed first: "I am an executive coach in Denver working with new managers, mostly over video." It does not replace the rest of the page. It gives every retrieval a passage that carries the whole claim.
| How the page is written | What a grounded answer can do with it | The fix |
|---|---|---|
| Parts of the claim spread across sections | Back one part at a time, if it retrieves that section | One opening sentence that states all the parts |
| A detail that is out of date, such as a year or a price | Treat the whole claim as unsupported, in the strict case | Update it, or remove it if you cannot keep it current |
| A sentence that leans on the one before ("As mentioned above") | Lift a passage that has lost its subject | Name yourself and the service again in the sentence |
| A claim stated only in an image or a slide | Nothing, if there is no text to match | Write the claim as text beside the image |
| A claim that is vague ("I help people grow") | Back only a vague statement, which rarely gets used | Say what you do, for whom, and where |
The small facts that sink a whole sentence
A small wrong detail can sink the whole sentence, because a grounding check asks whether the claim is fully supported, not mostly. Google's documentation is explicit: partial support does not count, and its example treats a claim with the wrong date as ungrounded.
For a small business, the usual culprits are ordinary: "now booking for 2025", a package price you changed last spring, a program you no longer run, or a count of clients that has not been updated in two years. Each one sits inside an otherwise useful sentence and makes the sentence harder to use.
The practical rule is simple. Keep the facts in your key sentences few, and keep them current. A sentence that states what you do, where and for whom rarely goes out of date. A sentence that also carries a price, a year and a count needs checking every season.
What grounding does not do for you
Grounding does not decide whether your page is found. It governs what an answer can say about the pages it already retrieved, so a perfectly written page that never gets fetched is never checked at all.
Getting fetched is a separate problem, with its own causes: whether assistants can read your site, whether other sites mention you, and whether your pages match the questions buyers ask. How Google picks the pages behind its summaries is covered in how do AI Overviews choose their sources, and what it means when your page is the one linked is in what is a citation in an AI answer.
The damaging admission: rewriting your opening lines will not, on its own, get you named. It makes you easy to describe accurately once you are in the running, which is worth doing, and it is only half the job.
To see whether you are in the running today, start with the free check. It asks ChatGPT 25 real buyer questions from your niche at $0 and emails a plain-English readout: your score, who got named in your place, and the one fix to start with. It runs as soon as you ask for it, and the report lands within the hour between 7am and 5pm Central, or by 10am the next morning outside those hours.
Questions we hear the most
What is grounding in AI search?
Grounding is the practice of tying what an AI answer says to specific source passages it retrieved, so each statement can be traced back and checked. In a grounded answer, a claim with no supporting passage is supposed to be left out.
Is grounding the same as citing a source?
Not quite. Grounding is the support behind each statement, and a citation is the visible link to it. An answer can be grounded without showing links, and a link beside a sentence does not guarantee the sentence is fully supported.
Can a claim be supported by two different passages?
Yes. Google's grounding check allows a claim to be supported by one or more facts. The risk is retrieval: an assistant fetches passages rather than whole pages, and if the parts of your claim are scattered, it may only fetch one of them.
How long should a passage be to get cited?
There is no published length. Claude's citation feature splits plain text into sentences by default, so the smallest citable unit is often one sentence. Write the key claim so a single sentence carries it, then add detail after.
Does an out-of-date fact really cost the whole sentence?
In Google's grounding check it does: a claim has to be wholly supported, and its own example treats a sentence with the wrong date as ungrounded. Assistants do not all publish their checks, so treat that as the strict case worth writing for.
How do I find out what AI says about my business today?
Ask it the way a buyer would and note who gets named. The free check asks ChatGPT 25 real buyer questions from your niche at $0 and emails a plain-English readout within the hour: your score, who got named in your place, and the one fix to start with.
Does the $500 audit show which of my sentences AI repeats?
It shows what five assistants actually say about you and who they name instead. The $500 audit runs 125 checks across ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity and Google's AI Overviews and lands by this time tomorrow, with the answers themselves, so you can see which of your own claims come back.
Your buyers are already asking. Find out what AI tells them.
The free check asks ChatGPT 25 real buyer questions about your niche and sends you the report within the hour, at $0. If it shows you are already getting named everywhere, we will say so in plain words.
Get my free check →