GEO glossary
The techniques by which a model anchors its answer to documents retrieved at the time, rather than to memory alone.
Grounding is anchoring an answer to verifiable sources; RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation) is the technique by which a model retrieves relevant documents (from a web index or its own base) and uses them to generate the answer, citing them. It is the mechanism behind Perplexity, ChatGPT with web search, AI Overviews and Copilot.
For GEO, grounding is the fastest way in: pages retrieved at the time can change the answer in weeks, whereas training memory changes in months. Pages must however be indexed (Bing for ChatGPT and Copilot, Google for Gemini), readable by crawlers and written in extractable blocks.
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