Split your documents into chunks that help RAG give better answers

My RAG answers keep citing the right document but the wrong paragraph.

Beginner to intermediateRead 5 minDoing: an afternoon6 steps

What you'll have at the end

The boundary that was separating your failing answer's heading from its own content, or its qualifying clause from its main rule, rebuilt so the whole relevant passage lives inside one labeled chunk, confirmed on the real question that first exposed it.

Before you start

You need

A RAG pipeline that already retrieves and answers from your own documents, plus one real question where it named the right document but the answer came back wrong, vague, or incomplete.

Not covered

Picking or swapping the embedding model, and building a full evaluation harness that scores retrieval across many questions at once.

Leans on

Find the real break

Find the sentence your split cut

Choose and size your split

Match your split to the document's shape
Set a starting size and overlap

Rebuild and confirm

Split on headings before you split on size
Index small for matches, return big for context
Confirm the fix on the real question

Where to go next

Add a reranker so RAG stops burying the right chunk

once the right, whole chunk comes back but ranked below noisier ones

Your RAG's retrieval hit rate has never been measured

once you want to prove this fix's win rate across many questions instead of checking one by hand

Checked 15 Aug 2026

Part of the RAG (Retrieval Augmented Generation) cookbook