Improving your answers

An agent gets better by being given more to go on. The card Tips to improve your answers on the Overview is where you start. It does not say that an answer was wrong: many of the answers it points at were right. It shows where your sources said little, and what you can add so that the agent answers in your words next time.

The tips on the Overview#

Visitors asked about these lists questions from the period that your sources said little about. Each one opens its conversation, so you can read what the agent said. Under each question:

• Improve answer adds the right answer as a Q&A pair at once. The question starts as the visitor's own words, and the agent answers from the pair from then on. The same button is under every answer in Activity.
• Add a page or file opens Sources, for when the question belongs to a whole subject rather than one answer.

Below the list are general tips, shown only when they apply:

• Instructions, when the agent has none yet: a few lines on who your customers are, the tone to use and where to send people. See Instructions.
• Q&A, when the agent has no Q&A pairs yet: your most asked questions, with the answer you would give yourself. See Text and Q&A.
• Activity, always: read a few conversations, and correct an answer that is not how you would put it.

Reading an answer#

Before you change anything, read the question and the answer. "Do you also sell cars?" at a bicycle shop has no answer in your sources, and an agent that says it does not know is right. Leave it.

Look at what the visitor really asked. People ask in their own words, and those are often not yours.

When the information is not in your sources#

This is the cause nine times out of ten. Search your own sources for the answer.

It is not there. Add it:

• one specific question: a Q&A pair, with the question worded the way the visitor worded it. Improve answer does this in one step
• a whole subject: a text source, or the page on your site that should have existed

It is there, but the page was never read. Check Websites for why a crawler misses pages, and add the page as an Individual link.

It is there, in a scanned PDF. Then it is not there. See Files.

When it is there but was not found#

Open the conversation in Activity and look at the sources under the answer. If the right source is missing from them:

• Wording. Your page says "returns procedure", the visitor says "send it back". The search works on meaning and usually bridges this, but a Q&A pair in the visitor's words always does.
• Buried. The answer is one sentence in a long page about something else. Lift it out into a Q&A pair or a short text of its own.
• Drowned out. Ten blog posts mention the subject in passing and outrank the one page that explains it. Delete or exclude what the agent does not need.
• Minimum similarity too high, if you raised it. See Retrieval settings.

When the answer says more than your sources#

Good passages, and an answer that adds something of its own:

• Lower the temperature to 0.3 or so.
• Say it in the instructions: "If the sources do not state a price, say you do not know the price. Never estimate."
• Fill the gap. Models add the most where a source stops just short of what was asked. If the page gives the delivery time for Belgium and the visitor asked about France, add France.
• Check for a conflict. Two sources that disagree, such as an old and a new price list, produce answers that are half wrong. Delete the old one.

When the answer is right but poorly put#

• Too long, too stiff, wrong tone: that is an instructions matter.
• Mixes two products up: lower Top-K results so that it reads fewer passages at once.
• Misses half of a two-part question: raise Top-K results, or try a stronger model in the Playground.

Check that it worked#

Ask the same question in the Playground, and look for the right source under the answer. Then ask it once more in different words.

Make it a habit#

Ten minutes a week in the first month, then once a month. The list gets shorter quickly, because visitors ask the same things.

If you use an AI assistant such as Claude, it can do the reading for you. Over MCP it can fetch these questions, propose the missing Q&A pairs, and add them once you have approved them.

What happens behind the scenes#

Every answer is still measured, twice. Before it is written, the agent scores how well your sources covered the question, from 0 to 100. After it is written, a second check, made by a model that sees only the passages and the answer, judges whether the answer stays with them. The second check does not read your instructions, so it cannot tell a fact from your instructions apart from one the model added.

These measures choose which questions appear under Visitors asked about these, and when the contact form may appear after an answer that may have missed (see Leads). They are no longer shown as a label on each answer, because an answer your sources said little about is often still right. Visitors never see them. Developers get both on every answer as confidence and grounding, see the API reference.