Retrieval Abstraction Layer

Retrieval Abstraction Layer is the practice of putting your own evaluation and routing layer between client deliverables and whichever RAG vendor supplies parsing, indexing, and retrieval. The category description makes the strategic case: standardizing on one vendor locks retrieval quality and pricing in place, while abstracting the tooling lets an agency swap providers as accuracy benchmarks move. Concretely, that means a fixed test set of client documents, a scored rubric for answer grounding, and a thin adapter that maps each vendor's API to one internal interface. Ragie's managed context engine, Context.dev's web data API, and CiteLLM's passage-level verification each expose different primitives, so the adapter is what keeps a retainer portable. The margin logic is simple: retrieval quality regressions surface as client-visible hallucinations, and a benchmark you own turns a commodity API into a defensible delivery claim rather than a dependency.