RAG Is Not Finding Your Documents

What does this problem usually mean?

When a RAG system answers as if your documents do not exist, the failure can be in ingestion, chunking, embeddings, storage, retrieval or filtering.

What to check first

1. 1

   Confirm that the expected documents were ingested successfully.

2. 2

   Check document and chunk counts in the target collection or index.

3. 3

   Verify that the embedding model used for queries matches the indexed data strategy.

4. 4

   Review metadata filters that may exclude the document you expect.

5. 5

   Run a simple retrieval-only test before blaming the generation model.

Important: verify the result

Change one thing at a time and repeat the same test afterwards. A successful command is not proof of a fix; verify that the original failure can no longer be reproduced.

Note: Provider features, limits and versions can change. For version-specific questions, always verify the current vendor documentation.