Grounding Verification Ratio

Grounding Verification Ratio measures the share of an AI answer's claims that trace back to a specific passage in a source document, and treats that ratio as the deliverable rather than the answer itself. Agencies sell grounded outputs, so a retrieval pipeline that returns plausible text without passage-level provenance is a liability dressed as a feature. The ratio gives delivery leads a number to put in front of clients: if 40 of 50 extracted values link to a highlighted PDF passage, the engagement has an audit trail; if 12 do, the client is paying for confident guesses. CiteLLM's Check mode exists precisely to score claims against source PDFs, while Ragie's parsing and entity extraction determine how much of the source corpus is even addressable. Pair the ratio with a token-cost audit, since Forrester warns that agentic workflows billed by consumption can erode retainer margin when verification passes multiply calls.