Enterprise buyers need more than a compelling demo—they need confidence the system will remain reliable, governable, and observable under evolving workloads and compliance expectations. This guide offers a concise, testable evaluation rubric.
Core Dimensions
- Retrieval & Grounding
- Latency & Stability
- Security, Privacy & Isolation
- Observability & Metrics
- Governance & Change Safety
- Total Cost & Contract Flexibility
- Roadmap Resilience & Vendor Posture
1. Retrieval & Grounding
Measure whether answers are anchored in authoritative passages.
Checklist:
- Citation specificity (deep paragraph vs. top-level summary)
- Zero-result detection and surfacing
- Handling of near-duplicate content
- Freshness: time to incorporate a changed page
- Guardrails for hallucination fallback (deflection, escalation)
2. Latency & Stability
Capture both single-query speed and sustained responsiveness.
Metrics:
- P50/P95 answer latency across 20 sequential mixed queries
- Warm vs. cold start delta
- Error rate (non-2xx) and timeout %
- Throttling behavior under burst (5 concurrent sessions)
3. Security, Privacy & Isolation
Confirm least-privilege boundaries and data hygiene.
Evaluate:
- Multi-tenant data path separation (storage + vector index)
- Transport security (TLS/mTLS, header signing)
- Configurable retention + crypto shredding approach
- Role-based access with audit log completeness
- SSO & SCIM readiness
4. Observability & Metrics
You need actionable insight—not vanity charts.
Signals:
- Per-embed metrics (coverage %, orphan chunks, staleness age)
- Query distribution + top zero-result queries
- Relevance sampling workflow (human + heuristic convergence)
- Prompt version lineage & rollback timing
- Alert surfaces (latency SLO breach, ingestion errors)
5. Governance & Change Safety
Reduce regressions while shipping improvements.
Look for:
- Prompt versioning with diff + rollback
- Controlled canary for new embedding model or chunking scheme
- Re-index impact analysis (expected churn %)
- Environment parity (staging vs. prod index shape)
6. Total Cost & Flexibility
Understand cost evolution.
Consider:
- Transparent unit economics (crawl, embed, query)
- Overage handling & soft limits notifications
- Annual vs. monthly delta
- Contract exit and data export terms
7. Roadmap Resilience
Assess adaptability to underlying model/provider shifts.
Questions:
- Abstraction layer for multiple LLM providers?
- Strategy for model deprecation or price shock?
- Frequency of security updates & public change log cadence?
Quick Evaluation Flow (Day 0 → Day 7)
Day 0: Spin demo (5 pages) → run 10 baseline queries Day 1: Expand to 20–30 pages → grade relevance sample Day 2: Latency soak (sequential + light concurrency) Day 3: Prompt variant test + rollback simulation Day 4: Security & audit log export review Day 5: SLA & incident history request Day 6–7: Contract / pricing modeling scenarios
Red Flags
- Generic answers lacking grounded citations
- Invisible or coarse metrics (only aggregate traffic)
- No prompt/environment version lineage
- Opaque model costs or aggressive overage penalties
- Missing multi-tenant isolation articulation
Final Compilation Package
Deliver internally: relevance grades table, latency summary, security control matrix, cost projection sheet, and risk register (with mitigation owners).
If a vendor cannot support this evidence-driven process, treat it as a maturity gap.
Strong evaluation discipline de-risks adoption and accelerates confident scaling. Treat the process as a structured experiment with clear accept/reject thresholds, and you will avoid costly late-stage surprises.