Teach Aide your website and help center.

"Train a chatbot on your website" usually means pointing a tool at a URL and hoping it reads the right pages. For customer support, that's where the work starts. The agent needs your returns policy more than your homepage, your products as they are today rather than on import day, and a way to find out what it still doesn't know.

A note on the word "train": Aide doesn't train a model on your data. It looks up your knowledge for each question, so when you fix an article, the next answer uses the fix.

Import your website

Your site is the fastest place to start, and the import does most of the sorting for you.

1. Paste any page of your site at sign-up, or add a website source in Knowledge. A product link with tracking parameters works; Aide keeps the site itself.
2. Exclude sections you don't want answered from, such as /glossary or /blog/tag. A path covers the page and everything under it.
3. Let the import run. Aide reads up to 300 pages, taking pages from each section of your site in turn, so a glossary with hundreds of links doesn't use up the budget before your returns policy is read.
4. To pull in one section later without a full import, add pages from a URL such as https://yourstore.com/policies.

Your sitemap is read too, so pages nothing links to are found. If an import finds nothing, it says why (the address doesn't exist, the site refused automated readers, or there's no readable text) and what to try next.

Add your help center and products

Import a help center from Zendesk, Gorgias, Front or another platform. Articles keep their titles. A page that is briefly slow is retried up to three times, and an article imported from two places counts as one document.

With Shopify connected, the website import skips product, collection, cart, account and search pages, including under market prefixes such as /en-ca/. Your products come straight from Shopify instead, as real product pages with images, options, every variant, collections and metafields. When a price or stock level changes in Shopify, the agent knows.

Write what your site doesn't say

Some answers only live in your team's heads: the cut-off for same-day shipping, what counts as final sale, who handles wholesale. Write them as articles in Aide; they publish on save. Add business information such as your phone number, email and social links, and Aide gives them out exactly as saved.

Then tell Aide which answers to prefer:

• Star the articles that should win. A starred article ranks higher when it matches, so your current refund policy beats an older page that says something similar. A star never pulls an article into an unrelated answer.
• Limit a scenario to certain sources with "Answer only from these sources". A store with two brands can answer each brand's questions from its own help center.

Test before customers see it

Read what the agent says before any customer does.

• Try the agent from its page. The preview shows what it is answering from, so a wrong answer points straight at the article to fix.
• Preview drafts on real conversations. A scenario shows how many conversations from the last 28 days it matches, and owners and admins can run Aide's draft on them.
• On a connected helpdesk, read Aide's drafts on recent solved tickets next to the replies your team actually sent.
• Keep a helpdesk inbox in Watch only, where Aide drafts on live tickets inside Aide and writes nothing to the helpdesk, until you're ready.

Keep it current

Every week, Knowledge shows a Gaps list: what customers ask that your team answers but your knowledge doesn't cover. Each gap is checked against your whole knowledge base first, drafts included, so Aide doesn't propose what an article already says. It comes with the text to add and the article it belongs in, or the sentence to replace when an article says something your team no longer does. Gaps are ordered by how many conversations raised them, and close once fixed.

On a new account with a connected helpdesk, Aide also reads up to 32 recent replies from your team and writes the agent's style guide: what the business is, how replies sound and close, and how long they run. It needs at least 20 replies, removes customer names, emails and order numbers before reading, and never writes over instructions you've edited.

For how to structure articles so the right one wins, see building a knowledge base your AI agent can answer from.