The Stack
How to — know if RAG is actually doing anything
Judging a RAG system by reading its answers tells you almost nothing. That is the trap: a fluent, confident, well-cited answer can come from a model that never retrieved a single document — and a genuinely grounded one can still fail because the right text never surfaced. The way to know if retrieval is actually doing anything is to stop grading final outputs and start asking two separate questions. Here is how to do that without building a research lab. RAG stands for retrieval-augmented gener
