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What Is Retrievability?
Understanding retrievability helps tech writers recognize that an answer can exist in the docs without being returned by AI answer engines when needed
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Retrievability (noun)
An enabling capability that determines whether a retrieval system can locate and return the right content for a given query.
Consider this question: “How do administrators export audit logs from the cloud version?”
Suppose our docs include the correct procedure, but the way we present the additional information needed obscures the right answer.
Perhaps the heading we chose reads “Exporting data” and the name of the product sits near the top of a long page of procedural info. And, the cloud-only restriction lives in a note.
If an AI retrieval system searches thru short passages from our docs, it may retrieve the procedure without the detail that says it applies to the cloud version. Or, perhaps it accesses the step-by-step instructions without finding the note that qualifies it. As a result, a similarly worded procedure for on-premises users may be referenced to generate an answer instead.
Even when the correct answer appears in our docs, unclear wording or poor content organization choices can make it harder for a retrieval system to differentiate it from other similar procedures.
Writers shape how documentation reads and how it’s organized, including the metadata attached to it. The retrieval system determines what gets indexed and how a query is matched against it.
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Why Tech Writers Must Understand Retrievability
Clear writing alone can’t resolve the kind of gap the audit-log example shows. If retrieval never surfaces the right passage, no amount of good writing fixes what the model never saw.
We tech writers make all sort of choices a retrieval system can find. In the audit-log example, using the heading “Exporting data” is one of those choices. A specific task name gives the system more context when it looks at that passage by itself.
The same is true of consistent terminology that distinguishes similar features and applicability statements that clearly identify a cloud-only restriction, rather than relegating it to a separate note elsewhere in the docs.
Understanding retrievability helps us see that the answer can be in our docs but still fail to appear when someone needs it. Finding out why it fails may require us to work with customer support teams or the others who manage search and AI systems.
We bring our knowledge of the documentation: which procedure answers the question and the conditions under which it applies. When we can see real user questions and the system’s results, we can use that knowledge to investigate specific failures.
