RAG Chunking and Parsing: Proven Fixes for Better Answers
Retrieval systems are judged on their answers but built on their chunks. This guide covers the two steps that create them: parsing, which turns a file into usable text, and chunking, which cuts that text into the units your index stores. It compares fixed, recursive, structure-aware and semantic splitting, sets out workable size and overlap ranges, explains the metadata that turns a search result into a citable answer, handles the document types that defeat generic splitting, and shows how to measure retrieval with a gold question set before you trust it.
