diff --git a/arborist/wallet/bucket.py b/arborist/wallet/bucket.py
index fc278be..98a2c44 100644
--- a/arborist/wallet/bucket.py
+++ b/arborist/wallet/bucket.py
@@ -94,12 +94,23 @@ def _to_fts5(query: str) -> str:
     stopwords, OR's the remaining content tokens. Returns an empty
     string when nothing survives — the caller treats that as "no hits."
 
+    NFKD-folds accents first so a user typing ``pokemon`` matches
+    ``Pokémon`` body terms (FTS5's default tokenizer is "unicode61"
+    which folds the same way, so the bucket-direct path agreed before
+    this fix; the sidecar path's ASCII-only word regex did not).
+
     Examples:
-        "who developed virt-back?" -> "virt OR back"
-        "what is anarchism"        -> "anarchism"
-        "merkle tree"              -> "merkle OR tree"
+        "who developed virt-back?"       -> "virt OR back"
+        "what is anarchism"              -> "anarchism"
+        "merkle tree"                    -> "merkle OR tree"
+        "pokemon red"                    -> "pokemon OR red"
     """
-    tokens = [t.lower() for t in _FTS5_WORD_RE.findall(query)]
+    import unicodedata
+    folded = "".join(
+        c for c in unicodedata.normalize("NFKD", query)
+        if not unicodedata.combining(c)
+    )
+    tokens = [t.lower() for t in _FTS5_WORD_RE.findall(folded)]
     keep = [t for t in tokens if t and t not in _FTS5_STOPWORDS and len(t) > 1]
     return " OR ".join(keep)
 
@@ -851,9 +862,16 @@ class MultiShardSidecarCorpus:
         the sum of reciprocal ranks across shards. Standard k=60 is
         TREC-recommended.
 
-        score_rrf(d) = sum over shards of 1 / (rrf_k + rank(d, shard))
+        Post-merge title-relevance filter: drop hits whose titles
+        share zero query tokens with the query. Mirrors local
+        query.py's ``search.title_filter`` step — without it,
+        small shards (e.g. a 200-doc personal blog) hand back rank-1
+        hits for any matched token, ties with rank-1 from a 1M-doc
+        shard under RRF, and ranks above topically correct docs. With
+        the filter, off-topic docs are dropped before the merge.
         """
         from concurrent.futures import ThreadPoolExecutor
+        from arborist.wallet.sidecar import fold_accents, tokenize_text
 
         def _one(item):
             sh_url, sh_client, _ = item
@@ -874,6 +892,26 @@ class MultiShardSidecarCorpus:
             for sh_url, hits in ex.map(_one, triples):
                 per_shard.append((sh_url, hits))
 
+        # Title-relevance filter: drop hits whose title shares zero
+        # query tokens. tokenize_text already folds accents + drops
+        # stopwords, so "Pokémon Red and Blue" → {pokemon, red, blue}
+        # overlaps query {starter, pokemon, red}; Russell Ballestrini
+        # blog root → {russell, ballestrini} overlaps NEITHER → dropped.
+        # Falls open (no filter) if the query has no content tokens
+        # after sanitization.
+        query_tokens = set(tokenize_text(query))
+        if query_tokens:
+            def _title_relevant(h: dict) -> bool:
+                title = h.get("title") or ""
+                if not title:
+                    return False
+                title_tokens = set(tokenize_text(title))
+                return bool(query_tokens & title_tokens)
+            per_shard = [
+                (sh_url, [h for h in hits if _title_relevant(h)])
+                for sh_url, hits in per_shard
+            ]
+
         # RRF merge: keyed by document_root so duplicates across shards
         # (rare but possible — e.g. a doc replicated for redundancy)
         # combine.
diff --git a/arborist/wallet/sidecar.py b/arborist/wallet/sidecar.py
index dce5459..f991218 100644
--- a/arborist/wallet/sidecar.py
+++ b/arborist/wallet/sidecar.py
@@ -76,6 +76,8 @@ from dataclasses import dataclass
 from pathlib import Path
 from typing import Iterable, Sequence
 
+import unicodedata
+
 from arborist.compress import unpack_chunk
 
 
@@ -91,10 +93,27 @@ _WORD_RE = re.compile(r"[A-Za-z0-9_]+")
 from arborist.wallet.bucket import _FTS5_STOPWORDS as STOPWORDS
 
 
+def fold_accents(text: str) -> str:
+    """NFKD-normalize + strip combining marks → ASCII-equivalent.
+
+    Critical for retrieval: a user typing 'pokemon' should match
+    Wikipedia titles like 'Pokémon Red and Blue', and our ASCII-only
+    word regex was splitting 'Pokémon' into ['Pok', 'mon'] (because é
+    is not in [A-Za-z]), so the term 'pokemon' never landed in the
+    dictionary. NFKD folds 'é'→'e' before tokenization fires.
+    """
+    return "".join(
+        c for c in unicodedata.normalize("NFKD", text)
+        if not unicodedata.combining(c)
+    )
+
+
 def tokenize_text(text: str) -> list[str]:
-    """Lowercase word tokens, drop stopwords + 1-char tokens."""
+    """Lowercase word tokens, drop stopwords + 1-char tokens.
+    Accent-fold first so 'pokémon' indexes/queries as 'pokemon'."""
+    folded = fold_accents(text)
     return [
-        t.lower() for t in _WORD_RE.findall(text)
+        t.lower() for t in _WORD_RE.findall(folded)
         if t.lower() not in STOPWORDS and len(t) > 1
     ]
 
@@ -502,7 +521,9 @@ class SidecarReader:
                 return t
             query_stems = {_t_stem(t) for t in terms}
             for did in scores:
-                title = self._doc_title(did).lower()
+                # Same accent-fold + tokenize on the title side so
+                # 'pokemon' (query) overlaps 'Pokémon' (title).
+                title = fold_accents(self._doc_title(did).lower())
                 title_tokens = {_t_stem(t) for t in _WORD_RE.findall(title)}
                 overlap = len(query_stems & title_tokens)
                 if overlap: