The mayor’s office wants press FAQ answers grounded only in approved briefing books, not informal staff drafts. How should retrieval be scoped?

The mayor’s office should scope semantic search for press FAQ answers to the approved briefing-book corpus only so grounding stays on reviewed municipal messaging. Curated briefing books define authorized facts, figures, and talking points; corpus cache only, metadata only, or vector cache only are retrieval plumbing, not press-ready evidence. Scoping semantic search to the approved briefing-book corpus cache only queries a cached copy rather than the approved books themselves, leaving no current approved content to ground public answers. Scoping semantic search to the approved briefing-book metadata only targets descriptive fields rather than the book content, so no approved facts are retrieved and grounding is lost. Scoping semantic search to the approved briefing-book vector cache only queries cached embeddings rather than the approved corpus itself, so answers lose versioned, citable briefing-book grounding. Exam caveat: press FAQ retrieval for municipal communications is scoped to approved corpora—not corpus cache only, metadata only, or vector cache only substituting for approved materials. Operational check: build a briefing-book-only index with version and approval metadata; do not mistake corpus cache only, metadata only, or vector cache only for that index; test press FAQ prompts for citation only to approved books; add a human review gate for high-visibility releases before publication. Treat briefing-book updates as versioned corpus publishes so superseded talking points drop from retrieval the same day communications approves the replacement book.