---
name: "tech-rag-toc-pollution"
title: "RAG: TOC docs pollute retrieval"
description: "Table-of-contents pages rank well but answer poorly — filter or downweight"
type: "tech"
category: "rag"
tags: ["tech", "llm-agents", "rag"]
related: ["[[tech-rag-citation-guards]]", "[[tech-rag-metadata-key-drift]]"]
---
TOC/index pages often dominate vector search without answering the question.

Mitigate: exclude TOCs, chunk body-only, or metadata filters. Related: [[tech-rag-citation-guards]], [[tech-rag-metadata-key-drift]].