Can I use MongoDB Atlas Vector Search without RAG?

Absolutely. Semantic search over your knowledge base, recommendation engines, duplicate detection, similarity search across user profiles, image search with CLIP embeddings, and anomaly detection all use Vector Search without any LLM involvement. RAG is the highest-profile use case in 2026 but not the only one. Roughly 40% of the MongoDB Atlas Vector Search projects we ship do not touch an LLM at all. If your users would benefit from "find things like this" or "search that understands meaning", Vector Search alone (with no LLM in the loop) is often the right answer.