Advanced Retrieval Strategies

Main Advanced Retrieval Strategies

There are a variety of more advanced retrieval strategies you may wish to try, each with different benefits:

See our full retrievers module guide for a comprehensive list of all retrieval strategies, broken down into different categories.

Basic retrieval from each index
Advanced retrieval and search
Auto-Retrieval
Knowledge Graph Retrievers
Composed/Hierarchical Retrievers
and more!

More resources are below.

Query Transformations

A user query can be transformed before it enters a flow (query engine, agent, and more). See resources below on query transformations:

Composable Retrievers

Every retriever is capable of retrieving and running other objects, including

other retrievers
query engines
query pipelines
other nodes

For more details, check out the guide below.

Composable Retrievers

Third-Party Resources

Here are some third-party resources on advanced retrieval strategies.

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/for-agents/mcp/ - Other LlamaIndex tooling for agents — the LlamaParse Platform MCP server, agent skills and plugins, and the n8n node — is mapped at https://developers.llamaindex.ai/for-agents/