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Enterprise RAG Tiers

Turn Private Data into aTrusted Research Engine

A clear path from first-class hybrid search to agentic deep research—private, secure, and tuned to your domain.

Back to Enterprise RAG
Build scope

Scope follows the application.

Not every application needs enterprise identity, domain-specific ranking, or multi-step research. The scope depends on the knowledge, users, relevance requirements, and interaction the product must support.

Tell us what you are building and Searchplex will shape the appropriate scope.

Languages, modalities, and deployment are included where the application requires them.

The four tiers

What Searchplex can build

Each tier represents a materially different class of delivery work. The conversation determines which capabilities belong in the engagement.

T1

Foundational

A bounded RAG build where the primary challenge is retrieving useful evidence and producing grounded answers.

Delivered outcome

A reliable source-to-evidence path for the agreed application.

Build scope
  • ·Source ingestion for the agreed corpus
  • ·Searchable-unit and content representation suited to the application
  • ·Lexical, vector, or hybrid retrieval as the workload requires
  • ·Ranking, evidence presentation, and citations where appropriate
  • ·An initial evaluation baseline and agreed deployment
Best for

A public website assistant, bounded knowledge assistant, news or content experience, or first production RAG application.

T2

Enterprise-Grade

A RAG build where enterprise data boundaries and operating requirements become part of the retrieval system.

Delivered outcome

The source-to-evidence path remains correct across enterprise access, sources, and operating constraints.

Build scope
  • ·Multiple enterprise sources and connectors where required
  • ·Identity, permissions, and access-aware retrieval
  • ·Versions, freshness, source authority, and traceability
  • ·Production load, filtering, and latency constraints
  • ·Customer-cloud, sovereign, self-hosted, or other deployment requirements
Best for

Workplace knowledge, internal copilots, employee-facing assistants, or applications spanning several governed enterprise sources.

T3

Domain-Optimized

A build where general retrieval and ranking are insufficient for the relevance requirements of the domain.

Delivered outcome

Domain-specific retrieval and ranking quality improves against evidence the team can inspect.

Build scope
  • ·Domain-specific query understanding and richer ranking signals
  • ·Hybrid-fusion changes, reranking, or learning to rank where justified
  • ·Specialist embeddings or model adaptation where evidence supports them
  • ·Domain entities, metadata, or relationships where useful
  • ·Deeper relevance evaluation against an agreed baseline
Best for

Legal or regulatory research, specialist technical or scientific knowledge, and high-value applications where domain relevance materially affects product quality.

T4

Deep Research & Synthesis

A build for applications where one retrieve-and-answer cycle is insufficient.

Delivered outcome

Multi-step retrieval and synthesis can be inspected and evaluated across the workflow.

Build scope
  • ·Planning and iterative retrieval across a research task
  • ·Source routing, evidence accumulation, and verification
  • ·Synthesis across multiple sources or conflicting evidence
  • ·Trajectory and session traceability
  • ·Tool use where the application requires it
Advanced optimization options

When retrieval architecture alone cannot meet specific behavioural requirements, the scope may include model adaptation, preference optimization, or RL-based post-training, with evaluation tied to defined decision behaviours. These techniques extend the build; they do not define the tier.

  • Model adaptation or fine-tuning
  • Preference optimization
  • RL-based post-training
  • Domain-specific reasoning or decision tuning
Best for

Research assistants, due diligence, complex analytical workflows, and applications that must gather and reconcile evidence before answering.

Enterprise RAG →Evaluation & Operations →
Start here

Tell us what you are building.

Searchplex will scope the RAG architecture and build around the application, data, and operating requirements.

Explore Enterprise RAG