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Retrieval-grounded, not hallucinated: how Drift cites every claim.

The line between a confident answer and a usable answer is evidence. Drift is built to retrieve source records first, then generate from the evidence it found.

April 14, 2026·7 min

Grounding comes before generation.

We treat source retrieval as a prerequisite, not a nice-to-have. The system pulls the household records, notes, statements, and policy documents that matter before it drafts a sentence. That keeps the answer anchored to what the firm actually knows.

Citation is part of product design.

If the reviewer cannot see where a claim came from, the answer is not ready. Evidence needs to be visible at the point of approval, not hidden in a debug console or left to the user to reconstruct after the fact.

Confidence without provenance is a liability.

In regulated work, a smooth answer that cannot be traced back to records is worse than no answer. Firms do not need better improvisation. They need better recall, traceability, and escalation when the record is incomplete.

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