Glossary
Document parsing converts a file's text, layout and metadata into structures a system can search. How well it works depends on the format and the file itself.
Updated 21 Aug 2026
Parsing sets the ceiling for everything downstream. Whatever it gets wrong is carried silently into retrieval, into the citation and into the answer, where it looks like a reasoning failure rather than an ingestion one.
Ask for a worked example on your own material, and the evidence needed to reproduce it.
We use “Document parsing” only where a product mechanism or an evaluation method backs it up, and we say when the behaviour depends on how a deployment is configured.
Pick a real piece of work, agree what a good answer looks like, then go through the results together.