Knowledge Base

The Knowledge Base is the core component of your Quickchat AI Agent. It serves as the foundation for your AI Agent’s understanding of your company, products, and services. A well-structured and comprehensive Knowledge Base ensures your AI Agent can effectively handle user queries and deliver accurate responses.

This guide provides an overview of the Knowledge Base, strategies for building it effectively, and tips for optimizing its performance.

Data sources

The toolbar at the top of the Knowledge Base page lets you add knowledge from any of these sources:

Add Article

Manually-written articles. Title + rich-text body. Use this when you want full control over the exact wording — FAQs, internal policies, product specs, or anything you’d otherwise paste from a doc.

Tip

Keep each article focused on a single topic. Long, multi-topic articles confuse retrieval — splitting them gives the AI cleaner answers.

Add Paragraph

Short, atomic facts that don’t need a full article. Paragraphs are grouped together (e.g., under a “Single Paragraphs” folder) and treated as bite-sized knowledge units. Good for one-liners like “Shipping takes 3–5 business days” or “Returns are accepted within 30 days”.

Add Website

Import content from any URL. Four import modes:

• Single Page — imports one webpage. Use Advanced options → HTML selector to restrict the import to a specific part of the page (e.g., main, #article-body, .docs-content) when the rest of the page is navigation, ads, or footer.
• Multiple Pages — paste a list of URLs; each becomes its own article.
• Sitemap — point at a sitemap.xml; every page in the sitemap is imported as a separate article. Best for documentation sites and structured blogs.
• All Pages — site-wide crawl of every reachable URL on the domain. Use for full documentation imports or company blogs.

URLs stay linked to their source. You can re-pull the latest content for one article from its row menu, or use Refresh all URLs in the top right to re-pull every URL-backed article at once.

Automatic refresh

URL-backed articles can also re-pull themselves once a day, so the Knowledge Base follows the source page without anyone touching it.

Three things to know before you rely on it:

• It is per article, not account-wide. Turn it on for the articles you want kept in sync.
• It is available on paid plans only. On Free, use the manual refresh above.
• Editing an article’s content by hand turns it off for that article. That is deliberate — a daily re-pull would otherwise overwrite your edit the next morning — but it means a page you have customised stops tracking its source until you re-enable it.

There is no way to change the daily interval.

Upload File

Upload documents (PDF, Word, PowerPoint, Excel/CSV) and more; scanned images are OCR’d. Text is extracted automatically and indexed. Max file size: 32 MB.

Shopify MCP

Connect your Shopify store so the AI can answer questions grounded in your live product catalog, orders, and inventory. Paste your store URL to set up the connection. Behind the scenes this configures a Shopify MCP Custom Action — you can also manage it from Actions & MCPs. See Custom Actions.

Intercom Articles

Bulk-import every article from your connected Intercom Help Center. Requires Intercom to be connected under External Apps → Intercom first. Re-running the import syncs new and updated articles.

YouTube

Paste a YouTube URL to import the video’s transcript as an article. Useful for tutorial channels and product walkthroughs you don’t want to re-write by hand.

Tips for building an effective Knowledge Base

Each uploaded text article, URL, or PDF should be self-contained and comprehensive, covering the topic thoroughly. A well-structured Knowledge Base ensures the AI Agent has the necessary context to respond effectively.

Read the below tips to set your AI Agent for success:

Steps to build and refine your Knowledge Base

1. Get clear on the purpose
   Define the role of your AI Agent and the types of questions it will answer. Organize your knowledge into categories based on user needs and flows.

   E-Commerce AI Agent Example:

   • Browsing & Shopping: Product details, comparisons, and FAQs.
   • Buying: Payment methods, discount codes, and taxes.
   • Delivery: Shipping, order modifications, and tracking.

   Student Loan AI Agent Example:

   • Before Applying: Eligibility and loan conditions.
   • Applying: Guides, terms, and walkthroughs.
   • After Graduation: Repayment schedules and deferrals.

2. Ensure data quality
   The quality of AI responses depends on the data you upload. Focus on:

   • Readability: Remove irrelevant information, tables, or redundant headers from uploaded content.
   • Relevance: Ensure the content answers common questions and aligns with user expectations.
   • Consistency: Avoid contradictory or outdated information, and ensure consistent formatting (e.g., dates, prices).
   • Text-only content: Since images are not supported, ensure vital information is conveyed through text.

3. Prioritize clarity
   Ensure each article is clear, concise, and easy to follow. Use logical paragraph structures and focus on relevant details.

4. Be exhaustive
   Provide as much detail as possible to equip your AI Agent with the knowledge needed to handle complex queries.

5. Use answers instead of Q&A
   Focus on providing comprehensive information rather than specific question-and-answer pairs. The AI Agent can extract relevant details as needed.

6. Embed URLs within text
   Always include URLs within the text for reference. Even when uploading via the URL uploader, linking to products or forms within the text improves usability.

   Example:
   For an e-commerce AI Agent, include links to forms like order cancellation:
   “To cancel an order, submit a request here: https://example.com/cancel-order.”

7. Test thoroughly
   Testing is essential to refine your Knowledge Base. Simulate user interactions to identify gaps or inconsistencies and adjust the content accordingly.

Common issues

• The AI Agent skips links or doesn’t include URLs in responses Ensure relevant links are embedded within the text of each article.
• Repeated or redundant information Avoid uploading duplicate content across multiple Articles.
• Missing key details in responses Consider creating separate Articles for specific details, like criteria or special cases.
• Incorrect dates or prices Verify and update all Articles to maintain accuracy.

Building an effective Knowledge Base is an iterative process. Start with clear objectives, organize content logically, and test extensively to refine your AI Agent’s performance.

Note

If you need assistance setting up your Knowledge Base or require custom integrations, feel free to reach out to us at contact@quickchat.ai.

Search

The Search feature allows you to quickly find specific articles in your Knowledge Base by searching through both their titles and content.

How to use search

1. Enter keywords or phrases into the Search bar at the top of the Knowledge Management interface.
2. The results will instantly update to display articles containing the entered text in their title or content.

Multi-select and bulk delete

The multi-select and bulk delete functionality makes it easy to manage multiple articles in your Knowledge Base.

How to use multi-select

1. Navigate to the Knowledge Base list
2. Click the “…” sign next to the Article you want to select and click “Select”
3. Check the boxes on the left next to the Articles you want to select. You can select one or multiple articles simultaneously
4. Once selected, the Articles will remain highlighted for further actions

How to perform bulk delete

1. After selecting the articles using the multi-select feature, click the Delete option at the bottom to remove the selected articles
2. Confirm your action to delete all selected articles permanently

Tags

Tags help you organize the Knowledge Base and let the AI Agent narrow down which articles to consult for a given question. You’ll see tags on every article row and as a filter at the top of the list.

There are two ways to tag an article:

• Manually — open an article and use + Add Tag in the right-hand metadata panel.
• Auto-tag with AI — click Auto-tag with AI in the same panel. Quickchat reads the article and suggests tags based on its content. Useful for bulk-imported KB (Sitemap, All Pages, Intercom) where manually tagging hundreds of articles isn’t realistic.

Use the Tags filter in the toolbar to narrow the list to articles matching one or more tags.

How your changes go live

There is no retrain step and no button to press. Every change to the Knowledge Base is processed automatically in the background, one article at a time — and only the articles you actually touched are reprocessed, so the rest of your Knowledge Base keeps answering questions the whole time.

This applies to every way content changes: adding or editing an article, deleting one, importing a website or a file, refreshing a URL by hand, and automatic daily refresh.

Article status

Every row in the Knowledge Base list has a Status column:

Status	What it means
Pending	Queued, waiting to be processed.
Processing	Being processed right now.
Ready	Live. Your AI Agent is using this article.
Failed	Processing didn’t complete. See If an article fails.

Statuses update on their own — you don’t need to reload the page.

While anything is still in flight, the top of the app shows “N articles still processing”. It disappears once everything is done. Most articles are Ready within seconds; large imports take longer, because articles are processed in batches.

When an article is live

As soon as an article shows Ready, it is live everywhere at once: your deployed widget, every connected channel, the API, and AI Preview. There is no separate publish or deploy step, and no draft copy of your Knowledge Base sitting between you and your Agent.

Caution

Because nothing is staged, an edit reaches your live AI Agent as soon as it finishes processing. If your Agent is in production, review article content before you save, and re-run a simulation dataset afterwards to confirm the change didn’t cause a regression.

If an article fails

A Failed article simply isn’t used by your AI Agent. The rest of your Knowledge Base is unaffected, and your Agent keeps answering from everything that is Ready.

Most failures are temporary, and Quickchat retries them for you automatically, so they usually clear on their own. If you don’t want to wait, click Retry next to the “N failed to process” message at the top of the app to retry every failed article straight away.

If an article keeps failing, the source content is usually the problem: an empty page, a file with no extractable text, or a URL that no longer resolves. Open the article to check what was actually imported, or re-import it from a working source. If it still fails, email us at contact@quickchat.ai.

Everything else takes effect immediately

Only Knowledge Base content goes through processing. Settings — Identity, AI Personality, Languages, Actions, Inbox replies, Insights, and Conversation Rating — apply the moment you save them.