Benchmarked Graph-RAG vs. Graph-Free Multi-Hop RAG: The graph mostly bought us a massive rebuild bill, not accuracy.

We kept hitting the same wall building multi-hop RAG: the systems with the best accuracy (GraphRAG, HippoRAG 2, RAPTOR) all lean on a knowledge graph built offline - and that’s great numbers, until the moment your data changes! Every update means re-running an LLM indexing pass to rebuild the graph. For a corpus that moves daily (prices, filings, tickets, news), you're paying that rebuild cost constantly. So we tested whether the graph is actually necessa