When should you use semantic chunking over recursive chunking?

Use semantic chunking when document structure is weak, such as transcripts, long essays, or OCR output without clear headings and paragraphs. It excels at finding topic boundaries in flowing prose where recursive splitting would break mid-idea. Avoid semantic chunking on well-structured documents like API docs or textbooks, where recursive splitting by section and paragraph gives similar results at a fraction of the compute cost. Semantic chunking adds an embedding pass during ingest, which can triple total indexing time on large corpora.