How do you verify that an answer's citations actually support its claims (grounding verification)?
An LLM can cite a source that does not say what the answer claims. The signal is verifying claim-by-claim entailment against the cited text, not merely that a citation marker exists, and knowing what to do when grounding fails.
Updated Sep 2026 · Grounded in real GenAI, LLM, and AI/ML engineering interview loops and written to a senior-engineer editorial bar.
An LLM can cite a source that does not say what the answer claims. The signal is verifying claim-by-claim entailment against the cited text, not merely that a citation marker exists, and knowing what to do when grounding fails.
Lead with where the obvious approach breaks, because that is the judgment they are screening for — most candidates jump straight to the happy path and lose the room.
Then walk the failure back through the pipeline in order, naming the one metric the customer's exec sponsor actually cares about before you propose the fix.
