RAG systems fail when the knowledge base is treated as a static dump. In practice, enterprise content changes daily, ownership is unclear, and outdated documents remain searchable long after they should have been retired.
A content review workflow makes freshness and quality operational.
Define ownership and review SLAs
Every source needs an owner. For each content domain, define:
- Owner. Who approves content and responds to issues.
- Review cadence. How often content is reviewed for accuracy.
- Freshness targets. How quickly updates must appear in the index (see knowledge base governance).
Use quarantine and approvals for risky sources
Not all content should be indexed immediately. Introduce a quarantine stage for new sources, user-generated content, or content with ambiguous ownership. This reduces data poisoning and low-quality ingestion risk (see data poisoning).
Make metadata mandatory
Review workflows depend on metadata. Capture owner, domain, confidentiality level, and effective dates. Treat this as part of ingestion design (see metadata strategy and ingestion pipelines).
Plan for deprecation and deletion
Content lifecycle includes deprecation. When a document is retired or corrected, you need reliable reindex and deletion workflows so stale answers stop appearing (see deletion workflows).
Measure quality like a product
Track retrieval quality and user outcomes. If trust drops, treat it as an operational incident and stabilise quickly (see evaluation playbook and incident response).
When content is governed with clear ownership and workflows, RAG becomes a dependable capability instead of a constant source of surprises.