A knowledge source is something an agent is allowed to answer from, and there are 4 kinds: pasted text, an uploaded file, a website, and a set of Q&A pairs. Add your shipping policy once and every agent you point at it can answer a dozen delivery questions from it, in its own tone and in the language the review was written in.
Sources live in the Knowledge bank, which belongs to the location rather than to any 1 agent. You add a source once and pick which agents read it.
A document answers many questions loosely, a Q&A pair answers 1 question exactly. Most locations want both. Writing pairs has its own article: Agent knowledge and question pairs.
What you need: a document, some text, the address of a page on your site, or the questions your team answers most.
Add a source to the bank
- Open AI Agents and go to the Knowledge bank tab.
- Press Add a source.
- Choose Paste text, Upload a file, Add a website or Q&A pairs.
- Under Source name, give it the name you would give a folder. It is shown beside every answer that used it.
- Fill in what that kind needs: the text, the file, the address, or the question and answer rows. For a website, press the check first and it tells you how many pages it would read.
- Press the Add button at the bottom right.
The add a source dialog with the paste text, upload a file, website and Q&A pairs options across the top.
The card appears in the list and reads Ready once it has been read and split up, usually within a few seconds. A file or a website can take longer, and the card updates itself when it lands.
The Knowledge bank listing 3 sources, each with a status pill and a passage count.
Files can be PDF, .docx, plain text or Markdown. A website is either the 1 page you name or every page in the site's sitemap, and a site that is larger than your page limit is read as far as the limit goes and says so on the card. A set of Q&A pairs has nothing to fetch, so its card carries Edit pairs where a document carries Refresh, and its count reads in pairs rather than in pages.
Pick which agents use it
Adding a source to the bank does not point any agent at it. Open an agent, go to the Knowledge tab, and tick what it may read under Sources this agent uses.
The Knowledge tab of an agent, with a checklist of Knowledge bank sources and 2 of them ticked.
Ticks on an agent that already exists save themselves, and the line beside the heading says so. On a new agent they are saved when you create it, so you can build the whole agent, its sources included, before the first save.
The same source can be ticked on as many agents as you like. There is 1 copy, so refreshing it updates every agent at once.
What a passage is, and why it matters
Each source is split into short passages, and an agent pulls in the handful that match the review. That is why paragraph breaks matter: a paragraph that covers 1 thing answers 1 question well.
Write a source the way you would write a help page, 1 idea per paragraph, and keep the facts and the sales language apart. A passage full of adjectives retrieves badly and reads worse in a reply.
Refresh and delete
Each card in the bank has a Refresh button. It reads the source again and updates what every agent using it knows. Press it whenever the document behind it has changed. A website is fetched again, so a changed page really is picked up.
Refreshing when nothing has changed costs nothing and the card says the agents already knew everything in it. Deleting a source removes it from the bank and from every agent that was reading it, straight away. Replies already written stay where they are.
See what an agent would recall
Under an agent's source list there is a box called What the agent knows. Type a review, press the button, and it lists exactly the passages that agent would read before answering, each naming the source it came from and how well it matched.
Nothing matched is a result rather than a fault: the agent answers from its instructions and hands the review to a person instead of guessing. If it happens for a question you expected it to answer, the fact is missing, buried in a paragraph about something else, or the source is not ticked on that agent.
Limits and what it costs
- 1 agent can read up to 25 sources. The bank itself is bounded by your plan's document and page limits, shown on the tab.
- Every source counts as 1 document, and a set of Q&A pairs counts as 1 page as well, however many pairs are in it. A set holds up to 200 pairs.
- A very long paste is shortened rather than refused, and the card says so. Split it into 2 sources to keep all of it.
- Adding, refreshing and looking things up are free, however many sources you add.
- A grounded reply costs more than a plain one, and the tab says the exact number before you add anything.