Policy-grounded answer

An answer about shipping, returns, warranty, or other transactional policies that is tied to authoritative policy artifacts and is auditable back to a cited source artifact and version.

StoreSteady treats policy-grounded answer as a reference term because Ungrounded answer: No source citation; answer cannot be audited.

• Ungrounded answer changes what a crawler, shopping channel, or AI assistant can safely infer about the merchant surface.
• Without a named category, operators tend to treat policy-grounded answer as generic AI noise instead of a reproducible finding with evidence and a validation path.

• answers from merchant chatbots, AI search summaries, and agent-mediated policy queries, where the answer must trace back to a canonical merchant artifact.

Sample AI policy answers. For each, require (a) explicit citation, (b) cited-source-version metadata, (c) verification that the cited content actually supports the asserted answer.

• A chatbot answering "Returns are easy!" without specifying the policy or citing a source.
• An answer that paraphrases the policy plausibly but provides no audit trail to verify against drift.

1. Identify the merchant-controlled source that creates the policy-grounded answer signal.
2. Reconcile visible copy, machine-readable data, policy text, feed state, and checkout behavior where the term applies.
3. Keep the fix high-level in public docs; detailed remediation belongs inside paid scan workflows.

Rerun the same evidence capture used for detection. The finding is validated only when the original policy-grounded answer signal no longer reproduces and adjacent source surfaces still agree.

• NIST GenAI Profile - source and provenance verification →
• W3C PROV - provenance metadata model →

• AI policy misstatement →
• Provenance stamp →
• AI commerce QA →

• StoreSteady public methodology →
• NIST GenAI Profile - source and provenance verification →
• W3C PROV - provenance metadata model →