RAG and grounding data is licensed content delivered so that AI assistants and agents can retrieve current, citable information at query time instead of relying only on what a model learned in training. It includes news, reference content, regulations, product catalogues, company data, scientific abstracts and specialist knowledge bases. AI product teams, enterprise search teams and agent developers buy it to improve accuracy, freshness and source attribution.
Typical fields
- Document or chunk ID
- Title, passage text and source URL
- Publisher and author attribution
- Publication and last-updated timestamps
- Language, topic and entity tags
- Pre-computed embeddings, where offered
- Licence flags for display, citation and caching
Sources and methods
Providers license content from publishers and data owners, or compile public and official sources, then clean, chunk and index it. Some deliver raw documents for you to index yourself, while others offer retrieval APIs, search endpoints or MCP servers that agents can call directly. Freshness pipelines detect updates and remove withdrawn or corrected content.
Delivery and pricing
Delivery is usually through retrieval APIs, MCP servers, streaming updates or bulk files for self-hosted indexes. Pricing is often per query or per thousand retrievals with volume tiers, plus fees for bulk access or premium sources. Rights to display excerpts, cache content and use it for training are usually separate.
Before you buy
- Confirm rights for retrieval, display of excerpts and caching.
- Check whether training use is excluded.
- Ask about update latency and how corrections and withdrawals flow through.
- Require attribution metadata for citations.
- Test retrieval quality on your own questions.