Evaluation Layer Ownership

Evaluation Layer Ownership treats the scoring harness as the agency's real asset, not the retrieval API. Ragie handles parsing, entity extraction, and hybrid vector, keyword, and summary indexes as a managed context engine, and ai·rete·rag shows the opposite pole: a Rete rule engine fixes the decision while retrieval only grounds the explanation. Both are swappable if the agency owns a fixed benchmark set, a scoring rubric, and a regression log. Without that layer, every vendor change becomes a re-qualification project billed against the retainer. With it, a provider swap is a config change measured in hours. The framework matters because retrieval quality and pricing move independently of the client relationship, so the agency that can re-run its own benchmark on demand keeps negotiating leverage and keeps grounded, source-cited output stable across accounts.