Stop graphing everything: When GraphRAG actually beats vector RAG

GraphRAG substantially outperforms vector RAG for complex, reasoning-heavy queries (10-13 point accuracy gains on multi-hop and contextual tasks), but offers no advantage for simple factual lookups and carries higher computational costs during indexing. Technology leaders should adopt GraphRAG selectively for use cases requiring cross-document synthesis and holistic corpus understanding, while maintaining vector RAG for straightforward retrieval tasks, as a complementary hybrid approach optimizes both performance and resource efficiency.