How to parse lots of PDFs and more into markdown, with Laravel

You want to ask questions about your own documents from a Laravel app. The AI SDK that shipped with Laravel 13 handles most of it: embeddings, vector queries, agents. What it doesn't handle is the part that comes first, where a user hands you a 40-page scanned PDF and you need clean text out of it.

That's the step this tutorial covers properly. The rest of the pipeline is here too, end to end: upload, parse, chunk, embed, search, answer.

What we're building

Users upload documents. We convert each one to Markdown, split it into chunks, embed the chunks into a pgvector column, and answer questions with an agent that searches those chunks. Postgres only, no separate vector database.

You'll need Laravel 13, Postgres with the pgvector extension available, and two packages: