Stop AI articles from hallucinating: retrieve, then write

Last year a single fabricated statistic in a published article cost me a client's trust. The model wrote "73% of small businesses report X" with total confidence. The number did not exist. Nobody had ever measured it. The client found out before I did. That one sentence taught me than any prompt engineering thread ever did. I have since shipped 63,000 articles through a production pipeline, and the thing that moved quality the most was not a better model or a cleverer prompt. It was deciding that the model is not allowed to know anything it cannot cite.