RAG Freshness Debt: When Your Index Is the Bottleneck

Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) fails quietly when the index is stale: answers sound confident while policy, pricing, and product truth have moved on. This composite case follows a business-to-business (B2B) software-as-a-service (SaaS) team that treated re-embed and re-index as “infrastructure misc.” until support tickets tagged wrong-version answers at 31 per 1,000 assisted sessions—then cut that to 7 per 1,000 by publishing freshness service level objectives (SLOs), versioned corpora, and separate chargeback rows for batch re-index. The fix was not a better model, but treating data freshness as a first-class product metric with a named owner and a visible budget. Illustrative composite.

Cross-domain lens: Just-in-time inventory systems flag stock age before pick—retrieval-augmented generation needs the same signal on corpus version before retrieve.