The knowledge base is the set of articles your AI assistant answers from: if a fact is not there, the bot does not make it up, it says it cannot help and, where your team can take over, offers a person. You keep it on the Admin > AI > Knowledge base page, where every article also shows whether the bot can already find it.
What an article is
An article in the knowledge base is a title and a text, nothing more. There is one knowledge base for the whole site, and every assistant on the site searches the same articles. Some messages in the panel call articles snippets: it is the same thing.
Articles arrive in several ways: you write them by hand, import files and web pages, connect a Confluence wiki, let your own AI write them, or approve suggestions drafted from resolved conversations. However an article arrived, the bot uses it the same way.
Where the bot looks
When the bot answers, it searches two places:
- the enabled articles on the Knowledge base page;
- articles of your help center that visitors can open (the article and its collections are published) and that have Allow AI assistants to use this article on.
Help center articles are not shown in the Knowledge base list, and articles you import here do not appear in the help center: these are two separate stores. The AI helpers for agents search the same knowledge when they help agents with replies.
Add an article by hand
- Open Admin > AI > Knowledge base and press New article.
- Fill in Title and Content. Write the content as a complete answer that makes sense without other articles.
- Leave Enabled on and press Create.
The content field takes plain text. To split a long article into sections, start each section with a Markdown heading such as ## Delivery times: search cuts the article at these headings, and every piece keeps its heading, so one long article with clear headings works as well as several short ones. More advice: Writing articles the bot can use.
Other ways to fill it
The buttons above the list lead to the other ways:
- Add knowledge loads PDF, Markdown, text and HTML files, web pages and whole sitemaps: Importing files, links and sitemaps.
- The Confluence tab of the same window connects a Confluence wiki that then updates itself: Confluence connector.
- Connect your AI lets Claude, ChatGPT, Claude Code or Cursor move articles over from Zendesk, Notion or a folder of documents: Connect your AI (MCP).
- Admin > AI > Suggestions collects answers your agents gave in resolved conversations, for you to approve: Learning from resolved conversations.
Edit, switch off or delete
Click an article's title, or open the row menu and choose Edit. After Save the article is indexed again by itself.
To stop the bot from using an article without losing it, open it and turn Enabled off. The Status column then shows Disabled and the Indexing column Not in search: turned off. The article stays in the list, and you can turn it on again at any time.
Delete in the row menu removes the article for good. Two kinds of articles behave differently:
- An article from Confluence is edited in Confluence. Here you can only switch it on or off, and its menu has no Delete.
- An article imported from a file or a link keeps your edit only until the same source is imported again from this page, or until Refresh from source in the row menu of a web page: the source version then replaces it. Imports by your own AI through Connect your AI do not overwrite your edit; they report a conflict instead (see Importing files, links and sitemaps).
What the columns mean
The Indexing column shows whether the bot can find an article:
| Value | Meaning |
|---|---|
| In search | The bot finds the article. The number next to it is how many pieces the article was cut into for search. |
| Indexing | The article is still being processed. |
| Not in search | Indexing failed: the article is saved, but the bot does not see it. Hover over the label to read the reason, then choose Reindex in the row menu. |
| Not in search: turned off | Enabled is off, so the bot does not use the article. Turn it on to bring it back. |
Indexing runs in the background after every save. If it fails, for example because the search model did not answer, it is retried automatically every minute, and Reindex starts it at once.
The Status column shows Enabled or Disabled, and Updated at shows when the article last changed.
Labels next to the title
A label next to the title tells where the article came from:
| Label | Source |
|---|---|
| Imported | A web page, imported here or by your own AI. Hover to see its address. |
| From file | An uploaded file, here or through your own AI. |
| Synced | Text that your own AI or the API wrote in, and articles kept after a Confluence wiki was disconnected. |
| Confluence | A connected Confluence wiki. |
| Auto-created | An approved suggestion from a resolved conversation. |
An article without a label was written by hand in the panel.
How the bot searches
When a customer asks something, the bot looks it up in the knowledge base before answering:
- Each article is cut into pieces of a few paragraphs, along its headings, paragraphs, lists and tables. Every piece carries the article title and its section heading, so a short article is also found by its title.
- Search works by meaning and by words. It collects pieces close in meaning to the question and, when a reranking model is available, also pieces that share the question's words or other forms of them, so a fact written in other words than the question is not lost. The reranking model then reads the question together with each candidate and puts the ones that answer it first. Without a reranker, the pieces closest in meaning come first and words are not searched.
- Up to ten pieces reach the model that writes the answer. Pieces only weakly related to the question are left out, and the total amount of text is capped.
- Codes such as
dev11,SKU-2041orapp:export(Latin letters with digits, or parts joined by a hyphen, underscore, dot, colon or slash) are also matched word for word, so a piece that contains exactly that code is not lost among similar text. - If the model replies without searching, the panel runs the search for it with the customer's message and adds the customer's two previous messages, so a follow-up such as "and how much is it?" keeps its topic. Several questions sent one after another are looked up one by one.
If the model that powers search stops answering, a backup search model can take over. It is set up under AI > Providers, see AI providers and your own model.
When nothing is found
If the knowledge base has nothing on the question, the bot does not answer from general knowledge. It tells the customer it could not find an answer and passes the conversation to your agents, or, in AI chat without agents, asks for another question. The details are in How the assistant answers.
Links to pages
When a customer asks for a link, the bot gives the address of the page the answer came from:
- an article imported from a link: the address of that web page;
- an article from Confluence: the page in Confluence;
- a help center article: its public page.
Articles from files, articles written by hand and approved suggestions have no address, so the bot gives no link for them. The bot is instructed to use only addresses that appear in the knowledge base results or in the conversation, never made-up ones.
Check what the bot finds
- Open Admin > AI > Assistants and open your assistant.
- On the Test tab, type a question the way a customer would and press Test (or Ctrl + Enter).
- Read the Drafted reply and, under Knowledge used, the articles the bot relied on, each with a match score.
The test sends nothing to customers. If an article you expected is missing from Knowledge used, check that it is Enabled and In search. Your own AI connected through Connect your AI can run the same check for you: ask it whether the bot finds the answer to a given question.
Who can manage it
The Knowledge base and Suggestions pages need the Manage AI features permission on the agent's role, see Roles and permissions. How much the knowledge base can hold depends on your plan: Plans, limits and billing.