Is your RAG grounded or guessing?

Our RAG evaluation audits retrieval and generation together: does the retriever find the right passages, and does the answer stay faithful to them?

We audit grounding against your sources. We do not rebuild your pipeline or train your models.

The short version

What is RAG evaluation?

RAG evaluation measures whether a retrieval-augmented generation system answers from its retrieved documents or makes things up anyway. It has two halves: retrieval quality (were the right passages found?) and generation faithfulness (does the answer stick to those passages?). Good RAG evaluation grades both halves, because a fluent answer built on the wrong documents is still a failure. If your chatbot answers from a knowledge base, this is the evaluation it needs.

Where it breaks

Where RAG systems quietly go wrong

RAG has two moving parts, which means two places to fail. Most teams only check one.

Wrong passages retrieved

The retriever missed

The system answers confidently from irrelevant or outdated documents because the retriever never found the right ones. We grade retrieval quality separately from answer quality, so you know which half is broken.

Right passages, wrong answer

The model ignored the evidence

Sometimes retrieval works perfectly and the model answers from memory anyway, contradicting the documents on screen. We check every claim in the answer against the retrieved passages and flag the drift.

Citation mismatch

Sources that do not support the claim

Systems that cite sources look trustworthy, which makes false citations worse. We trace each claim to its cited passage and mark where the source does not actually support what the answer says.

Stale knowledge

Old docs, new answers

Retrieval over an outdated corpus gives outdated answers with full confidence. We check whether your freshness handling works: are new documents retrievable, and does the system prefer them over old ones?

How it works

From samples to answers in three steps

01

Send samples

You send 20 to 50 questions with the retrieved passages and generated answers, plus your source docs.

02

We grade

Reviewers grade retrieval quality and answer faithfulness separately, backed by automated grounding checks.

03

You get the report

Sample-level grades, retrieval vs generation breakdown, recommended fixes, and a walkthrough call.

Deliverables

What you get

  • Sample-level grades. Every sample scored P0 to P3, with retrieval and generation graded as separate scores.
  • Faithfulness findings. Each unfaithful claim quoted and traced to the passage it contradicted or ignored.
  • Retrieval diagnosis. Where the retriever failed: missed documents, wrong ranking, or stale corpus, with examples.
  • Recommended fixes. Concrete next steps for chunking, ranking, grounding prompts, or freshness handling.
  • Walkthrough call. We go through the report with your team and answer questions.
20-50
pilot samples graded per batch
2-3
business days to your report
4
severity levels on every sample
100%
of reports reviewed by a human
Why it matters

Why RAG needs two scores

Retrieval and generation fail independently.

A RAG system has two halves that break in different ways. The retriever can miss the right documents, rank them badly, or pull stale versions. The generator can ignore good passages, contradict them, or answer from memory instead. Grading only the final answer cannot tell you which half broke.

We score retrieval quality and answer faithfulness separately. That split is what makes the report actionable: your engineers know whether to fix chunking and ranking or grounding prompts and citation behavior, instead of guessing.

Citations need auditing, not just presence.

A system that cites sources looks trustworthy, which is exactly why false citations are dangerous. Users check cited answers less carefully than uncited ones, so a citation that does not support its claim does more damage than no citation at all.

Our grading traces each claim to its cited passage and marks where the source does not support what the answer says. If your product shows citations to users, this check is not optional.

Freshness is a feature.

Knowledge bases change: prices update, policies revise, old documents get superseded. A RAG system that keeps retrieving last year's answer with full confidence is failing, even if every component works as built.

We check whether freshness handling actually works in practice: are new documents retrievable, does the system prefer them over outdated ones, and do answers reflect the current corpus? Stale grounding is one of the most common findings in RAG audits, and one of the easiest to fix once it is visible.

The scale

Every sample gets a severity, P0 to P3

P0
Critical. Fails the sample.
Fabricated facts presented confidently, unsafe content, or a completely wrong answer.
P1
Major. Needs rework.
Materially wrong or misleading. The output cannot ship as is.
P2
Minor. Small deduction.
Small errors that do not change the meaning. A polish issue, not a trust issue.
P3
Clean. No penalty.
Accurate, complete, well formed. This is the bar.
Every sample gets a severity, a reason, and a suggested fix. Nothing is averaged away.
Questions

Frequently asked questions

We need the source documents behind the graded samples at minimum: the passages the system retrieved and the ones it should have retrieved. For a pilot, a sample of the corpus is enough. We do not need your entire knowledge base on day one.

We evaluate retrieval behavior: what got found and what got missed, which tells you whether chunking is part of the problem. We do not re-chunk your corpus for you; we tell you where the evidence points.

Plain ones: did the retriever find the right passages, does the answer stick to them, and are citations honest. We explain every score in words, not just metric names, so the report is readable without a glossary. Our metrics glossary covers the standard terms.

Hallucination detection asks whether the claims are true. RAG evaluation also asks whether the retriever did its job. If your system uses retrieval, you need both halves graded, because each half fails in different ways.

Yes. Send real user questions with the full pipeline output: retrieved passages and final answers. We grade the whole chain, and the report shows whether failures came from retrieval, generation, or the handoff between them.

Not for the grading. We evaluate retrieval outcomes, not the algorithm behind them: did the system find the right passages, rank them well, and stay current? The diagnosis tells you whether the problem is retrieval, ranking, or generation regardless of whether you use dense, sparse, or hybrid search.

Find out whether your RAG is grounded.

Send a batch of questions and answers and get a grounding audit back in 2 to 3 business days once scope is confirmed.

STEP 1
Send samples
20 to 50 outputs and your rubric
STEP 2
Get graded report
Grades, patterns, fixes
STEP 3
Walkthrough call
We go through it with you

Not sure where to start? Talk to us and we will point you at the right evaluation.