Overview
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Knowledge base

Knowledge base overview

What the knowledge base is, the source types it holds, and how Asks turns your content into grounded answers.

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The knowledge base is everything your AI agent is grounded in. When a customer asks a question, the agent answers from this content — your website, your articles, your uploaded files — not from general internet knowledge. If something isn't in the knowledge base (or connected live, like your Shopify catalog), the agent won't claim to know it.

You manage it at app.asks.app/knowledge-base. The sidebar splits it into three source types, with an articles meter at the bottom.

Source types

Websites
Crawl your public site. Choose exactly which pages to include, and keep them in sync automatically.
Articles
Write answers directly in the dashboard — canonical policies, public help articles, or internal-only guidance.
Documents
Upload PDFs, Word files, spreadsheets, text files, and images. Asks extracts the text, including OCR for scans.
Articles & limits
What counts as an article, what each plan includes, and what happens at the limit.
Shopify catalog — if your store is connected through the Shopify channel, products and collections are answered live from Shopify at question time. They are not stored in the knowledge base and never use knowledge base articles. Store policies are answered live by default too; workspaces that chose to crawl their policy pages instead hold them as regular crawled pages.

How training works

Every source goes through the same pipeline:

  1. Extract — Asks pulls the plain text out of the source: crawled page content, article body, or text extracted from a file.
  2. Index — the text is split into chunks and indexed for retrieval.
  3. Retrieve — for each customer question, the agent searches the index and pulls in only the most relevant chunks.
  4. Answer — the agent writes its reply from those chunks and records which knowledge base items it drew on.

The agent retrieves per question, so it always works from the latest indexed version of your content — there is no separate "publish to the agent" step.

On Premium, indexing adds contextual chunking Premium — each chunk is stored with a short document-level context note, which improves retrieval on long or ambiguous content. It runs automatically; there is nothing to configure.

Articles

The meter at the bottom of the knowledge base sidebar shows how many of your plan's Knowledge Base Articles you've used. Every item counts as one article, whatever its type — a written article, an uploaded file, or a crawled web page. Deleting an item frees its slot immediately.

Plans include 300 (Starter), 1,000 (Business), or 3,000 (Premium) articles. See Articles & limits for the full breakdown, extra-article add-ons, and what happens when you hit the limit.

Each section — Articles, a website's pages, Documents — has its own search box, so you can check what the knowledge base already holds before adding more.

Websites page with the sidebar's Knowledge Base group expanded, website sources listed with page counts and sync times, and the Articles meter in the sidebar footer
The Knowledge Base group in the sidebar. The meter counts articles against your plan's limit.

When re-training happens

  • Articles are re-indexed the moment you save. Only articles that are Published with AI Agent enabled are indexed — drafts never reach the agent.
  • Documents are extracted and indexed at upload.
  • Websites re-index when you press Sync, when you save a new page selection, or on the source's auto-refresh schedule (weekly or monthly on Starter; daily available on Business and Premium). Pages whose content hasn't changed are skipped, so re-syncs are fast and never use new articles.
After adding or changing content, ask the agent a question that content should answer — in the Playground or your live widget — and check that the reply draws on the new source.
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