Short answer
Put your help center, Shopify products, business details and your team's unwritten answers in one knowledge base, and star the articles that should win. Aide then lists each week the questions your team answers that your knowledge doesn't cover, checked against every article, with the text to add.- Sources
- Help center, website, your own articles, Shopify products, business information.
- Organizing
- Nested collections, bulk move, starred articles, drafts kept out of answers.
- Narrowing
- A scenario can answer only from up to 20 chosen sources.
- Business details
- Phone, email and social links, given to customers exactly as saved.
- Gaps
- Weekly, with the text to add and the article it belongs in.
- Measuring
- Cited articles and how often their conversations resolve, from 30 outcomes.
A help center used to be written for customers browsing on their own. An AI agent reads it differently: one question at a time, looking for the passage that answers it, and it repeats whatever it finds. That raises the bar on three things. The knowledge has to be current, the right article has to beat a similar one, and someone has to know what is missing.
This guide covers how to structure and maintain knowledge in Aide. For getting your website and help center in the first time, see how to train an AI support agent on your website.
What goes in
Aide's Knowledge holds every source the agent answers from, and each kind does a different job.
- Help center. Imported from Zendesk, Gorgias, Front and other platforms. Re-import updates articles in place, and exact duplicates count as one document.
- Website. Your policies, guides and FAQ pages, read through your links and sitemap.
- Articles you write in Aide. Choose Publish and Aide answers from it straight away, or Save draft to keep it out of answers until it's ready.
- Shopify products. Synced as real product pages with images, options, every variant with SKU, price and stock, collections, and metafields such as materials, care instructions and size charts.
- Business information. Phone numbers, email addresses, social profiles and apps, each with a note such as "Weekdays 9 to 5".
Articles and products work together. When an article names a product by its exact title, Aide reads that product's page too. A reply to "this boot is discontinued, what else?" can then say which sizes of the suggested styles are in stock.
Order and account questions are answered from the customer's real order, for verified customers, not from articles.
Write it so the right article wins
Most wrong answers trace back to the knowledge base, not the agent: two articles that disagree, a policy buried in a long FAQ, a page nobody has touched since last year. A few habits fix most of it.
- One answer per article. "Return window for sale items" is easier to find than a paragraph halfway down a general FAQ.
- Write out the specifics. Windows, fees, cut-off times and who qualifies, so the answer never depends on a guess.
- Group articles into collections. Collections can be nested, and you can tick many articles and move them in one step.
- Star the articles that should win. A starred article ranks higher when it matches, and a short one, up to about 1,500 words, is read whole, so a size chart is answered from all of it.
- Delete what's outdated. Exact copies are merged, but two versions that differ by a word are still two documents.
How Aide finds the answer
Aide searches from what the customer is asking now. In a long email thread, quoted earlier emails and signatures are left out of the search. The words that carry the question decide: an article that matches several of them ranks above a product page that repeats "size" many times.
When nothing matches, Aide searches again in your pages' own terms, so a visitor asking for "case studies" finds your "Customer stories" page. When no article answers fully, it writes from the one or two closest.
Some questions should come from one place only. Add "Answer only from these sources" to a scenario and pick up to 20 sources. A store with two brands can answer each brand from its own help center, and a wholesale inbox from the wholesale guide. Copilot drafts follow the same rule.
Fill the gaps every week
The Gaps list in Knowledge shows, each week, what customers ask that your team answers but your knowledge doesn't cover. With a connected helpdesk it starts on day one: Aide reads the last 90 days and proposes articles for questions customers asked at least three times that your team answered by hand.
Before a gap is proposed, Aide checks it against your whole knowledge base, drafts included. Each one comes as one of three fixes, with a copy button:
- A new article, with its title and text.
- A replacement for a sentence an article gets wrong, quoted as it reads today.
- A draft that only needs publishing.
Gaps are ordered by how many conversations raised them, and close on their own once the next weekly check finds the fix. Dismiss one with a reason and it stays away for 90 days. When teammates answer the same question differently, Aide lists the answers and asks which one is policy, instead of drafting an article.
Measure what works
Analytics shows, for owners and admins, which documents Aide's chat replies drew on, how many conversations cited each, and how often those conversations were resolved. Below that, conversations Aide handed off for missing information are grouped by topic, each opening its conversations. Both download as CSV.
A routine that keeps knowledge honest:
- Weekly: work through the Gaps list.
- Monthly: look for cited articles whose conversations rarely resolve, and rewrite them.
- After any help center change: press Re-import.