I’m having Gemini write articles, using a very detailed and explicit prompt.
I want these articles to include a sense of authoritative, reliable context from web research, so I have switched on “Grounding with Google search”. The prompt explicitly asks Gemini to use search grounding to find some recent, supporting contextual info ie analyst forecasts or recent news on the topic in the story.
But, even with the combination of a) the feature switched on and b) an explicit instruction to use it, the response flat-out fabricates URLs to non-existent reports on what would otherwise be appropriate sources.
How can I stop this and force it to return only bona fide information?
I have previously found success in having search grounding return results within a small prompt - but it’s like that part is getting lost in my long, overall prompt.
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Still seeing this behavior with my prompts. Did you find any more details?
I consistently encounter difficulties with Gemini Pro 2.5’s grounding feature in Studio when attempting to generate references in APA 7th edition format, even when explicitly prompted for this functionality. A significant issue is that when I try to verify the provided DOIs, they frequently lead to non-existent resources. This necessitates an additional, time-consuming step of manually searching for studies on Google Scholar, a process that yields successful results only approximately 60% of the time. This workflow significantly increases the time required to produce accurate reports. Therefore, I believe there is a critical need for an enhancement that allows initial prompts to be directly grounded in scholarly, peer-reviewed knowledge bases.
Hi @Kelvin_Peek1 Welcome to the community.
With the 2.5 Pro model now stabilized, can you please check if the issue you reported is still consistently reproducible for you, and if it appears to be isolated to your specific scenario. We’d also really appreciate knowing if you’ve had the chance to test this out with any other use cases. Should the issue unfortunately continue to manifest consistently, providing us with a minimal and consistent set of reproduction steps will be immensely valuable for our investigation.
Thank you