diff --git a/docs/reference/search/request/fields.asciidoc b/docs/reference/search/request/fields.asciidoc
index 56a3d49207b5a..e929928d42740 100644
--- a/docs/reference/search/request/fields.asciidoc
+++ b/docs/reference/search/request/fields.asciidoc
@@ -1,6 +1,11 @@
 [[search-request-fields]]
 === Fields
 
+WARNING: The `fields` parameter is about fields that are explicitly marked as
+stored in the mapping, which is off by default and generally not recommended.
+Use <<search-request-source-filtering,source filtering>> instead to select
+subsets of the original source document to be returned.
+
 Allows to selectively load specific stored fields for each document represented
 by a search hit.