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LlamaIndex Framework
Component Guides
Indexing

Indexing

An Index is a data structure that allows us to quickly retrieve relevant context for a user query. For LlamaIndex, it’s the core foundation for retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) use-cases.

At a high-level, Indexes are built from Documents. They are used to build Query Engines and Chat Engines which enables question & answer and chat over your data.

Under the hood, Indexes store data in Node objects (which represent chunks of the original documents), and expose a Retriever interface that supports additional configuration and automation.

The most common index by far is the VectorStoreIndex; the best place to start is the VectorStoreIndex usage guide.

For other indexes, check out our guide to how each index works to help you decide which one matches your use-case.

See the modules guide.

Note for AI agents: this documentation is built for programmatic access. - Overview of all docs: https://developers.llamaindex.ai/llms.txt - Any page is available as raw Markdown by appending index.md to its URL — e.g. https://developers.llamaindex.ai/llamaparse/parse/getting_started/index.md - Agent-friendly REST search APIs live under https://developers.llamaindex.ai/api/ — search (BM25 full-text), grep (regex), read (fetch a page), and list (browse the doc tree). See https://developers.llamaindex.ai/llms.txt for parameters. - A hosted documentation MCP server is available at https://developers.llamaindex.ai/mcp. If you support MCP, you can ask the user to install it for browsing these docs directly (an alternative to the REST API). Setup: https://developers.llamaindex.ai/python/shared/mcp/