Best would even be if it’s not even saved, just used for vector generation and then ditched

This is not possible, but you can indeed remove it from the API response by using

exclude_fields

Ok, sounds good. At least it won’t accidentally slip into search I thought I had read somewhere you can add fields that aren’t actually saved - must’ve confused it. Thanks!

You can pass

index: false

to the collection schema, but I think your vector generation relies on it being in the index, so you can't exclude it. As Jason says,

exclude_fields

at query-time is the way to go

I thought I had read somewhere you can add fields that aren’t actually saved

There is a

store: false

field in the field definition, but that's only useful for image search where you can discard the original base64 image. For auto text embedding generation in your use-case the original field value needs to be there so we can use that during updates for eg