The bot does not read whole articles: search cuts every article at its headings into pieces, and only the pieces that match a question reach the bot. So write each section to answer one question on its own, under a heading that names it, keep facts in text rather than pictures, and check the result with real customer questions.
Start with your company
Make the first article about your company: what you do, for whom, where you work and how to reach you. The bot answers "what do you do?" and "how can I contact you?" from it. While our models answer for you, the assistant description cannot be edited (see Assistant settings), so this article is where the general facts about you live.
If you have nothing written yet, start with the 20 to 30 questions customers ask most often, each with a full answer.
One idea per section
- Give every section its own heading and let it answer one question. In an article you write by hand, start a section with a Markdown heading such as
## Delivery to Estonia. Imported web pages and HTML or Markdown files keep their own headings, while text taken from a PDF comes without them and is cut by paragraphs. - Search cuts articles at their headings into pieces of a few paragraphs. Every piece carries the article title and its section heading, so a heading that names the subject helps the right piece to be found.
- Word headings and text the way customers ask: if they say "refund", do not write only "reimbursement".
- Many short, precise sections work better than long walls of text. Whether the sections live in one long article or in many short ones matters less, because search cuts an article at its headings anyway.
Make every section complete
A piece is found and read without its neighbours, so each section must make sense on its own:
- name the subject instead of writing "it" or "as described above";
- keep conditions and exceptions in the same section as the rule they limit, not at the top of the article;
- give concrete facts: prices, deadlines, conditions, steps. Phrases like "we find an individual approach" give the bot nothing to answer from.
Write each article as a complete answer, not as a fragment that only makes sense next to another page.
Text, not pictures
Text inside images, screenshots and scanned PDFs is not read. Write every fact as text; an image can stay for human readers.
Give lists and tables a heading or a sentence that says what they are. A bare list, for example the names of technologies on a home page with no caption, is hard to find because nothing says what it lists.
Tables are fine
Prices, plans and schedules work well as tables. Give each table a header row: the bot then reads every row together with the column names. A long table is split between rows, and a row is cut only if it alone is longer than a whole piece.
Keep one fact in one place
When a price or a rule changes, change it in one article. Two articles with different versions of the same fact lead to contradictory answers, and duplicates also take up places among the up to ten pieces the bot receives for a question.
You do not need to prepare imports
Files and web pages need no reformatting, splitting or extra markup before you import them: the platform cuts them into pieces itself. If you want the bot to offer a link for further reading, import the page by its link, because articles from files and articles written by hand have no address to give. See Importing files, links and sitemaps.
Check with real questions
Ask questions the way customers ask them on the Test tab of your assistant (Admin > AI > Assistants), and look at Knowledge used: it shows which articles the bot relied on. Your own AI connected through Connect your AI can check the whole knowledge base this way at once, see Check your knowledge base with your AI. Details are in Knowledge base basics.
When the bot misses an answer
- If Knowledge used does not show the article you expected, first check on the Knowledge base page that the article is Enabled and In search. A switched off article shows Not in search: turned off.
- If the fact is not in the knowledge base at all, add it to the article where it belongs, as a section with its own heading.
- If the fact is there and the bot still does not use it, send the question to support@epavdesk.com. Finding the right piece is our job: do not add extra question-and-answer copies of the same fact to push the bot towards it.