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Dev.to
7/7/2026
The original title is "How Unstructured Documents Waste Tokens in RAG Pipelines"

The original title is "How Unstructured Documents Waste Tokens in RAG Pipelines"

Original: The Silent RAG Killer: How Noisy Document Layouts Can Burn 70,000 Tokens Before Your First Prompt

Short summary

Unstructured documents waste massive tokens on layout noise before your first prompt—with raw PDFs averaging 3,000 tokens per page. Use MarkItDown to convert documents to clean Markdown upstream, reducing per-page costs to ~300 tokens and improving RAG accuracy. Address data ingestion before tuning prompts or vector databases.

  • •Raw documents average 3,000 tokens per page due to layout noise; can waste 70,000+ tokens in typical RAG workflows
  • •MarkItDown converts PDFs/Word/Excel to clean Markdown, reducing per-page cost to ~300 tokens
  • •Optimize data ingestion upstream before tuning prompts or vector search

Generated with AI, which can make mistakes.

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