Anchoring generated content to verifiable sources or tools so answers cite reality—overlaps with retrieval patterns but emphasizes the reliability claim, not the pipeline name.
Grounding asks: can this statement be tied to evidence? RAG is one mechanism; tool calls that fetch fresh records are another. Grounding reduces but does not eliminate hallucination: retrievers can fetch wrong passages, and models can misread them.
Product language
Prefer “grounded in our docs as of DATE” over “the model knows.”