Build your knowledge base from your website or your own text

What this does

Instead of writing your knowledge base by hand, you can point Chatonio at your own website — or, if you have no website, paste what you know as plain text. It reads what you give it, splits it into focused articles — one topic each, picks up any question-and-answer pairs, and turns them into real knowledge-base entries the AI can use straight away.

It is the same reader behind the instant demo, without the time limit — so it reads more pages, follows the links you give it, and works on the project you are already signed in to.

Where to find it

You will find it in two places: on your project's Settings page, and under Knowledge Base → Articles (the Build your knowledge base button). When you create a new project it opens by itself, so the first thing you can do with an empty project is fill it — close it if you would rather set things up by hand. You need to be an admin or manager on the project.

What you give it

The first step asks where to read from: My website, Text I paste, or both. Pick one; the other is a click away under Also paste some text / Also read my website, and a run needs at least one of them.

• Your website — we start from this address and follow the pages most likely to answer support questions: FAQ, pricing, delivery and returns, instructions, terms, contact.
• Extra pages (optional) — paste specific links, one per line. These are always read; the automatic page-picking only fills whatever room is left.
• Text about your business — anything a customer might ask about, in your own words or copied from a document: your FAQ, prices, delivery and payment terms, policies, product descriptions. From 250 up to 200,000 characters. How it is read is described under No website? Paste what you know below.
• Three short answers about your business (optional, and the part most worth filling in). What your business does shapes who the assistant is. Rules the assistant must always follow becomes standing instructions it obeys in every reply — best used for hard limits, like figures it must not quote or promises it must not make. When a person should take over shapes the handover rules. None of them change which pages we read.
• Pages to read (website only) — how many pages to fetch. More pages means a fuller knowledge base and a slightly longer run.

No website? Paste what you know

Choose Text I paste and paste as much as you like — a document, your existing FAQ, a price list, the answers you give customers most often. It is read the same way a website is:

• Headings become articles. A Markdown heading, or a short line standing on its own between blank lines, starts a new section, and each section becomes an article titled after it. Text with no headings is split into articles by size and titled after its first sentence.
• A question followed by its answer becomes an FAQ entry. Put the question on a line of its own ending in a question mark — How do I return an item? — with the answer beneath it. Q: and A: labels work too.
• Nothing is summarised or dropped. Lists stay lists, a price list keeps its prices, and a section too short to stand on its own is folded into the one beside it rather than thrown away.

Articles written from text are filed under a From your notes category — rename it as you like — and the assistant's instructions are drafted from the text exactly as they would be from a site, with every fact checked against what you pasted. The two sources combine: read your site and add the things it does not say.

Add, or replace

There are two modes, and the difference matters.

• Add to the knowledge base — nothing existing is removed.
• Replace what was generated before — clears the entries a previous run created, then writes fresh ones. Always available.

What Replace does to what is already there depends on who wrote it:

• Entries a previous run generated are removed and written again from scratch.
• Entries you or your team wrote yourselves are never removed — not by Replace, not in any mode. The wizard tells you how many it is keeping.
• Generated entries someone has since edited or translated are kept too, unless you tick Replace the N edited entries too. That box is never ticked for you and says how many entries it covers. Ticking it loses those edits, along with any translations of those entries.

The usual reason to replace is a first build that did not come out well — a thin page was read, or the wrong links were followed — and you want a proper rerun, even if you tidied a few answers in the meantime. If your project already contains anything your team wrote or edited, the wizard opens on Add, so replacing is always a deliberate choice.

Visibility, and why entries are published straight away

New entries are Internal by default: the AI uses them immediately, and they do not appear on your public helpdesk. You can choose Public instead if you want them on the helpdesk too, and you can change any individual article's visibility afterwards.

Entries are always created as published rather than as drafts. That is not a shortcut — an unpublished article is not indexed for the AI, so a “review it first” draft pile would leave you with a knowledge base your assistant cannot actually use. Publishing them Internal gives you the benefit right away with nothing exposed publicly.

Articles are filed into sections named after your own site. A run that reads your policies, your guides and your pricing page creates a category for each, named in your site’s language. Anything the reader cannot place confidently goes into a single From your website category — which is also where everything lands if your page addresses do not give it enough to go on.

The assistant's instructions

Alongside the knowledge base, the run drafts a set of instructions for your assistant: who it is, what your business does, the facts it should know, the words your site uses, and what it must never claim. Every factual line is checked against the text actually found on your pages, and anything that cannot be traced back to your site is dropped rather than guessed at.

Those instructions are only applied if you tick the box. If your project already has instructions, the box starts unticked — we will not overwrite something you wrote. Either way the draft is saved with the run, so you can read it and copy the parts you like without paying for a second run.

What to do afterwards

1. Skim the new articles. Each one covers a single topic, which is what makes the AI’s answers accurate — a long policy page arrives as one article per section rather than as a single wall of text.
2. Delete anything that is not useful (menus, legal boilerplate you would rather it did not quote).
3. Switch the ones your customers should be able to read to Public.
4. Try the assistant. If an answer is thin, the fix is usually one short article about that topic.

When a site cannot be read

The run tells you exactly which pages it read and which it skipped, and why. The usual reasons:

• Blocked by robots.txt — we respect it. Allow ChatonioDemoBot in your robots.txt and run it again.
• Not enough readable text — pages that are almost entirely images, forms or interface. We try once to render a JavaScript-heavy homepage, but a site that renders everything client-side may still come back thin.
• Could not be reached — a login wall, a bot challenge, or a page that is simply down.

Pages behind a login are never readable, since we visit your site the same way an anonymous visitor does.

If your site cannot be read at all — or you have none — the text source works without it: paste the content of the pages, or write it yourself.

Cost and limits

Reading your site — or the text you paste, up to 200,000 characters per run — costs nothing. Understanding it is a single AI call, billed as ordinary AI usage against the project’s balance — a few cents, and the form tells you roughly how much before you start. Every new project begins with a small free balance so your first build simply runs. There is no plan requirement; the feature is available on every plan.

Beyond the balance itself there are two limits: a handful of runs per hour and per day, and a daily ceiling on how much one project can spend on generation. Neither is something a normal day of use will reach.

One run at a time per project, and a handful of runs per day. If a run is going you can close the window — it keeps going, and reopening shows you where it got to.

Handover rules

Tick Also write the handover rules and the run will additionally propose when a conversation should be passed to a person. It uses what your site says plus your own answer to “when should a person take over”.

One safety rule applies to what gets applied automatically: a run will never make your assistant less likely to hand over. If it concludes that your site barely needs a human at all, it says so in the result and leaves your current setting alone rather than switching it — you can still set that yourself on the project settings page.

One thing to know before you tick it: these rules become the complete handover policy. They take the place of the built-in defaults rather than being added on top — so the run is asked to restate the sensible baseline (an upset customer, a dispute, anything about money already taken, an explicit request for a person once they have said what they need) alongside the rules specific to you. Read them afterwards on the project settings page; they are always saved with the run whether or not you applied them.

Running it more than once

Re-running is safe and normal — after you have edited your site, or added pages. Anything already in your knowledge base is recognised and skipped rather than written a second time, so you will not end up with duplicates. The result tells you how many entries it skipped for that reason. The same holds when you replace and keep edited entries: the rerun does not write a second copy next to them, and your version stays.

Language

Articles and FAQ entries come out in whatever language your site is written in — we do not translate them. The assistant’s instructions are written in that language too, in all 27 languages Chatonio offers, so a German or Ukrainian site gets a German or Ukrainian setup rather than its own content wrapped in English headings.

If the language of your site turns out to differ from the language your project is set to, the result says so and offers to change the project language in one click.