Retrieval systems degrade when source ownership is unclear. The index may stay online while policies, product details, support runbooks, or approval rules quietly change.

Assign each source a business owner, technical owner, freshness target, permission contact, and retirement rule. These fields make retrieval maintenance an operating responsibility instead of an ingestion project.

Review source quality alongside answer quality. If a model answer is wrong because the source is stale, the remediation is source governance, not another prompt patch.