# Chain-of-verification

**Source:** https://promtable.com/glossary/chain-of-verification

> Chain-of-verification (CoVe) is a prompting technique where the model first drafts an answer, then generates verification questions for each claim, answers them independently, and revises the draft accordingly.

---
Chain-of-verification (CoVe) is a prompting technique where the model first drafts an answer, then generates verification questions for each claim, answers them independently, and revises the draft accordingly.

Chain-of-verification (Dhuliawala et al., 2023) measurably reduces hallucinations on factual generation tasks. The four-step recipe: (1) generate a baseline draft, (2) plan verification questions targeting each claim, (3) answer the verification questions independently from the draft, (4) revise the draft using the verification answers. The technique costs roughly 2-4× tokens vs single-shot but recovers most of the reliability lost when the draft was confidently wrong. CoVe ships under the hood in some 2026 production agent stacks and is worth using whenever factual accuracy matters more than latency.

## When to use

- Factual generation where wrong answers are costly.
- Long-form content with multiple claims.
- Background tasks where 2-4× token cost is acceptable.

## Common mistakes

- Letting the verification step reuse the original draft — the model rationalises its first answer.
- Skipping the independent re-answer — the verification becomes performative.

## Related terms

- [chain-of-thought](https://promtable.com/glossary/chain-of-thought)
- [self-consistency](https://promtable.com/glossary/self-consistency)
- [hallucination](https://promtable.com/glossary/hallucination)
- [grounding](https://promtable.com/glossary/grounding)

## Sources

- [Dhuliawala et al. 2023 (arXiv)](https://arxiv.org/abs/2309.11495)

*Last updated: 2026-06-01*
---

Original page: https://promtable.com/glossary/chain-of-verification
Maintained by Promtable (https://promtable.com). Content: CC BY 4.0. Cite as "Promtable — https://promtable.com/glossary/chain-of-verification".
Contact: info@vibecodingturkey.com.