How to Add AI Search to Your Product

Retrieved passages composed into responses with citations, confidence thresholds, and an honest 'no good answer' path that falls back to classic results — grounded or silent, never improvising.

A query evaluation set with graded answers, retrieval-hit and answer-accuracy metrics, and cost-per-query engineering — the difference between a feature and a liability is measurement.

Skipping the discipline this article describes until an incident, audit, or stalled project forces it — every practice above is cheaper adopted early than retrofitted under pressure.