Building a RAG system is only half the challenge. The real question is: how do you know if it actually works well?

RAG systems involve multiple components such as document chunking, embeddings, retrieval, and generation. If the final answer is poor, the problem could lie in any of these stages. Without proper evaluation, it becomes difficult to identify weaknesses or compare different approaches.

In this chapter, we will explore practical methods for evaluating RAG pipelines, including how to test retrieval performance, assess answer quality, and build evaluation workflows that help you continuously improve your system.