10 Chunking Strategies That Make or Break Your RAG Pipeline

A 2025 peer-reviewed study (Vectara, NAACL 2025) found something most RAG teams get backwards: Chunking strategy has equal or greater impact on retrieval quality than embedding model selection. Teams spend weeks choosing between OpenAI, Cohere, and Jina embeddings — then split documents every 512 tokens and call it done. The data says that's the wrong priority. I tested 10 chunking strategies against production benchmarks. Here's every strategy, with accuracy numbers, working code, and the speci