Grounding

Grounding is the reason AI visibility can change in weeks rather than model-release cycles. An engine answering from training memory can only repeat what it absorbed long ago; a grounded engine reads the current web, which means new pages, updated pricing and fresh third-party coverage can enter answers almost immediately. It is also the honest half of an engine's knowledge: grounded claims come with sources a user can check, and errors can be corrected by fixing the source. For a business, the practical questions are which engines ground on which indexes, Bing matters for ChatGPT, Google's index for AI Overviews, and whether your site is present and readable in those indexes. Content built to be retrieved, plain HTML, direct answers, honest freshness, gets a second route into answers that training data alone would never give it.