Retrieval is the first step in RAG and enterprise search. When a query comes in, the retrieval system searches the knowledge base and returns the most relevant content. This can use keyword matching, semantic search, or a hybrid of both.
The quality of retrieval directly determines the quality of what the AI generates next. Even the best language model cannot produce a good answer from poorly retrieved content. Retrieval is where most RAG failures actually occur — not in the generation step that users see, but in the retrieval step that happens before it.
