Knowledge base and help center

The AI assistant and Smart Answer only answer from what is in your project's knowledge base. The better it is kept, the less often the assistant has to hand over to your team.

You find the knowledge base of all projects at the top of the account under Knowledge base (/app/kb). It is for owners and admins. The page has two tabs, Knowledge and Help center, and shows at the top how many pages are in the AI, when the last crawl ran and whether there were errors.

What belongs in the knowledge base

• The pages of your website – read in by a crawl and supplemented by pages that visitors actually call up (“Seen live”).
• Products – from your site's data layer and your product feed (AI & knowledge tab, “Products the bot knows”).
• Files – PDF, Word, text, Markdown, CSV and HTML.
• Google Drive – documents, spreadsheets and presentations.
• Help center articles – your published help articles.
• Improved answers – questions for which you have stored the correct answer.
• Via Integrations, also content from Notion or Confluence.

Anything in the knowledge base can be repeated by the assistant to any visitor. Do not put internal documents, prices for individual customers or personal data there.

Reading in the website

In the Knowledge tab each project has a row with state, last crawl, number of pages and schedule. Crawl now starts a crawl; you can do the same on the project page under AI & knowledge, Crawl run section, with Run now. A crawl starts within a minute and takes a few minutes. If one is already running, no second one is created.

With the Schedule you repeat the crawl automatically: off (only on demand, the default), daily or weekly, from a particular hour.

What the crawl takes into account:

• It only reads the domains entered in the project.
• It follows your website's robots.txt and the sitemaps named there.
• It reads page text, data layer and product catalogue. Unchanged pages are not processed again.
• By default it reads up to 5000 pages. How many it should read at most, and whether it may read a password-protected preview environment, you set via the “KB-Crawler” integration.

Tip: run the crawl after you have published larger changes to your website. Otherwise the assistant answers with the old state for a while.

Blocking areas

Some pages the chat should never read, such as a customer area or internal pages. Enter them on the project page under AI & knowledge, Blocked areas, one path per line:

• /account blocks this page and everything below it, including with a language prefix such as /en/account.
• * is a wildcard, for example /shop/*/reviews.
• With ? the query part of the address is compared as well.

In blocked areas the chat stays visible, but it reads no page text there, the crawl skips them, and the assistant never names them as a source. When you save, anything already collected from these areas is removed. Up to 60 entries are possible; / on its own, i.e. the whole website, is not allowed.

Uploading files

Under /app/projects/…/kb/files (Files & Google Drive) you upload files: PDF, Word (DOCX), text, Markdown, CSV and HTML. The content is checked, not just the file extension. As the source, the assistant names the file name.

Each file shows its state: waiting, being read, in the knowledge base, error or being removed. “Found by their words only” means the file can already be found, but the finer search is still being caught up on.

With Replace you upload a new version; until it has been read, the old one applies. Passwords and keys that appear in the text are blacked out.

How large a file may be, how many pages a PDF may have and how many files a project can have depends on the plan. The page itself shows the numbers that apply and how much you already use.

Connecting Google Drive

From the Professional plan you can include content from Google Drive. On the same page click Connect with Google (you need the right to manage integrations) and then add the content you want via Link to a folder or file and Add, up to 50 entries.

• reactive.chat only gets read access.
• It reads Google Docs, Sheets (first sheet only), Slides as well as PDF, DOCX, text, Markdown, CSV and HTML.
• Changed files are read again regularly (the page shows how often), and deleted ones disappear from the knowledge base. Sync now reads again immediately.
• Disconnect removes all Drive content from the knowledge bases of all projects in the workspace.

The help center

In the Help center tab (or under /app/help) you write public help articles. They are useful three times over: visitors find them in the widget's Help tab, they appear on a public page of their own, and the assistant answers from them.

An article has:

• Title and Address (leaving it empty derives it from the title),
• Language – German, English or Polish,
• Section – groups the overview, one word is enough, such as “Shipping”; without a section the article is listed under “General”,
• Order,
• Summary – one or two sentences for the overview and search results,
• Text – in Markdown: headings, bold, lists, links,
• Status – draft or published.

Only published articles go into the knowledge base (“Yes — the bot can answer from it.”); the assistant does not use drafts. If you delete an article, it also disappears from the knowledge base.

For the help center to be publicly reachable, give it a name under Public address, made of lowercase letters, digits and hyphens. The articles are then at /help/… (in German /hilfe/…), readable without signing in and without JavaScript, with search. If an article does not exist in the reader's language, another language version is shown. The Help tab in the widget appears as soon as an address is set up and at least one article is published.

You can take over help articles from another chat provider through the migration (see Integrations).

Improved answers and knowledge gaps

If the assistant answered a question wrongly or not at all, you store the correct answer under Improved answers. The Knowledge gaps page collects which questions remained open. Both are described in The AI assistant.

Approving binding rules

For details that must be right, such as a return period, there is Review and approve knowledge (/app/projects/…/knowledge-review, listed in the knowledge base as “Review knowledge approvals”). For a document you set:

• Responsible person – who checks the content,
• Rule topic and Authoritative value, for example “return period” and “30 days”,
• Valid from and Valid until (empty means immediately or unlimited respectively),
• Approval – “Under review – exclude from AI” or “Approve this content”.

The assistant only uses a document managed this way with approval and only within its validity period. If the content changes, it needs a new approval. If different values for the same topic and the same language are approved for an overlapping period, the page reports a rule conflict. Only these details are recognised, not any contradictions in running text.

How to check that the knowledge arrives

• The key figures in the knowledge base and under Reports, AI & knowledge tab, show how many documents have been read, are pending, failed or are stale.
• Test runs check whether typical questions are answered correctly.
• The AI log shows the sources used for each answer.

All three are described in The AI assistant.