When using the models below with search grounding enabled I get “finishReason”: “RECITATION” and no response from the model.
Models:
- gemini-2.5-pro-preview-05-06
- gemini-2.5-flash-preview-05-20
I have read that this error is due to avoiding directly reciting copyrighted works: docs.
In its current form the recitation error is much too aggressive. Using search grounding without coming across this error is very difficult. This is frustrating as search grounding helps avoid hallucination by grounding answers in web search results. The recitation error seems to be at odds with the purpose of search grounding.
Methods attempted to avoid the error:
- Increasing temperature to 1.5 (some success, but unreliable)
- Removing instruction to quote (improvement, but still encountering issue at unworkable frequency)
- Reducing prompts to be very very straightforward. (incremental improvement, but still not enough)