IEO Engine Glossary Term

Live Retrieval

An AI inference architecture in which the system performs real-time web search and content retrieval during the response generation process for each user query. Live retrieval engines like Perplexity contrast with training-corpus engines that draw on data ingested during model training.

Live retrieval engines respond to current content updates more rapidly than training-corpus engines. A new page indexed today may be cited by Perplexity tomorrow but may not appear in ChatGPT's training-corpus retrieval until the next training checkpoint.

The IEO Engine measurement framework tracks live retrieval citations and training-corpus citations separately because they update on fundamentally different timelines. Both citation types are valuable but indicate different stages of the deployment's progression through the AI ecosystem.

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