Weak grounding & empty answers
What it means when /v1/reason returns few or zero verified citations.
POST /v1/reason sometimes returns an answer with grounding.used: 0 and an X-Dike-Grounding: weak header, or the insufficient-grounding sentinel text instead of a real answer. This is the hallucination guard working as designed, not a bug — see Reason reference for the mechanism. This page is about what to check before assuming something's wrong.
The corpus genuinely doesn't cover it
Check /coverage — case law depth in particular varies a lot by jurisdiction (Saudi Arabia publishes far less case law publicly than Egypt or the UAE). A question that assumes deep case-law coverage in a thin jurisdiction will legitimately come back weakly grounded.
The question is broader than the retrieval window
top_k (default 12) caps how many chunks get retrieved before the model even starts answering. A question that spans many articles or several distinct laws may need more context than the default window holds — try raising top_k, or narrow the question into more specific sub-questions and combine the answers yourself (see Agent tool-use patterns for chaining dike_search + dike_reason instead of one broad call).
Filters excluded the right document
Check filters on the request — a jurisdiction or status: ["in_force"] filter that's narrower than the question intends will silently retrieve from the wrong subset rather than error. If the answer you expect involves a repealed or amended law, status: ["in_force"] will exclude it from retrieval entirely.
It's correctly declining
Sometimes weak grounding is the right answer — the corpus doesn't have a clean basis for the question as asked, and returning an unverified-sounding answer would be worse than saying so. Don't suppress or retry-until-strong; show the caveat (see Grounded Q&A walkthrough step 3) rather than treating weak as a failure to route around.
Compare against /v1/search directly
If you're not sure whether the issue is retrieval or the model's synthesis, run the same question text through /v1/search first. If search itself returns nothing relevant, the problem is upstream of /v1/reason entirely — coverage or filters, not the hallucination guard.