The 2026 RAG Chunking Simplicity Paradox: Context Cliff at 2,500 Tokens Makes RecursiveCharacterTextSplitter Beat Semantic Chunking for Most Workloads

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A January 2026 systematic analysis and the February FloTorch benchmark both show simpler chunking strategies outperforming complex AI-driven semantic approaches: a context cliff at approximately 2,500 tokens degrades response quality, and sentence chunking matches semantic chunking up to 5,000 tokens at a fraction of the compute cost. RecursiveCharacterTextSplitter at 400-512 tokens with 10-20% overlap achieves 82-90% recall in production benchmarks — move to semantic or page-level chunking only when measured recall gaps justify the overhead.