What are the four stages of a RAG pipeline?

A typical RAG pipeline has four stages. Ingestion: documents are loaded, cleaned, and chunked into passages. Indexing: chunks are embedded and stored in a vector database with metadata. Retrieval: at query time, the user's question is embedded and used to find the most similar chunks. Generation: retrieved chunks are added to the prompt and sent to the LLM with instructions to answer based on them.