GraphRAG
Instead of flat chunks, documents are mined for entities and relationships which form a Neo4j knowledge graph. Queries are translated into Cypher traversals that hop across relationships — answering questions a vector search alone never could.
Stage-by-Stage Data Flow Explorer
Select a phase from the controller below, then click individual step nodes to view their technical role, inputs, outputs, and mockup diagnostics data stream.
Indexing
An LLM extracts entities and relationships from each document and writes them into a graph.
> INGEST_STREAM: "financial_report_2026.pdf" (Size: 2.4 MB)
> DECODING_META: { mime: "application/pdf", pages: 12 }
> READOUT: "Ragiment Corp Annual Report 2026. EBITDA grew 18% to $4.6M. Product lines expanded by..."Best suited for
Multi-hop, relational questions whose answers are spread across many documents.
Complexity
LLM-driven entity and relationship extraction, a graph database, and query-to-Cypher translation add real operational weight at both ingest and query time.
Relevance today
Rising fast in enterprise settings — Microsoft's GraphRAG popularized it — wherever relational reasoning over connected data matters.
Where it's used
Financial & legal analysis
Trace ownership, obligations, and dependencies across filings and contracts.
Scientific & medical literature
Connect entities — genes, drugs, conditions — across thousands of papers.
Compliance & data lineage
Answer “how does A affect C through B?” across an enterprise's records.
Why it matters
- Answers relational, multi-hop questions that flat vector search structurally cannot.
- Traversal paths make every answer explainable and auditable.
- Entities are deduplicated, so all facts about one entity are unified across the corpus.
Trade-offs & considerations
- Graph construction is LLM-heavy — ingestion is slower and more expensive than embedding.
- Requires a graph database (Neo4j) and well-tuned entity-extraction prompts.
- Overkill for simple lookup Q&A, where Standard RAG is cheaper and faster.
Alternatives to consider
When GraphRAG isn't the right fit, reach for one of these instead.