Watch: Document Grounding
Grounding an AI answer in the content of a specific web page you supply, rather than in results from an open web search.
Transcript
When you ask an artificial intelligence a question, it usually searches the open web for an answer. But there is another approach called document grounding. This is when the AI grounds its answer directly in the specific web pages you provide. You give the model a URL, it fetches the main text and title, and it answers using only that information.
OpenAI has offered this capability for a while, and Google recently introduced its own version called the URL Context tool, which lets Gemini read specific pages directly. For creators and website owners, this shift raises the stakes for machine readability. If an AI is going to fetch and read your page directly to answer a user's question, your site's main content needs to be clean and easy for a machine to extract. This direct page fetching is becoming a key part of how AI models retrieve information, sitting right alongside traditional web searches and advanced tools that pull from multiple structured sources at once.