Glossary
What is Data residency?
Verified 21 September 2026
Residency is usually discussed as a storage question: where the records live. For an AI system that retrieves from the web it is also a processing question, because a query sent to a search API is processed wherever that API runs, and the query carries the intent behind it. A model kept inside a jurisdiction that grounds itself through a provider outside it has moved the question, not the data.
Meeting residency for retrieval means the index, the query and the record of the query all stay inside the boundary. That is only possible for a provider that builds and serves its own index, because a reseller forwards the query upstream by construction.
unlob meets it with the sovereign edition: the same product deployed inside a customer boundary, where nothing crosses at query time and the query record is held by the customer.
How unlob handles this: Sovereign edition
Common questions
What is Data residency?
Data residency is the requirement that particular data be stored and processed within a specified jurisdiction, and it applies to a search query as much as to a database.
How does Data residency work in practice?
Meeting residency for retrieval means the index, the query and the record of the query all stay inside the boundary. That is only possible for a provider that builds and serves its own index, because a reseller forwards the query upstream by construction.
See it working
The free tier is 10,000 credits a month with no card — enough to test any of this against your own queries.