Your RAG Agent Is Retrieving the Wrong Chunk: 5 Failure Modes We Fix in Production

Short summary

RAG failures are usually retrieval failures, not generation failures. Five common modes—fixed-size chunking, semantic-only search, poor ranking, stale documents, and unchecked hallucinations—each have concrete production fixes. Proper retrieval evaluation and metadata management matter more than model size.

• •Retrieval failures cause most RAG errors, not generation problems
• •Five specific failure modes: chunking, semantic search, ranking, data staleness, and hallucinations
• •Production fixes include structural chunking, hybrid search, re-ranking, metadata filtering, and relevance scoring

Generated with AI, which can make mistakes.