Adding content manually
Hand-written content is the best knowledge your agent can have. It's marked curated, which ranks it above scanned pages and AI drafts.
Create an article
- Go to Content in your dashboard.
- Click New.
- Give it a title, choose a type, and write the body.
- Optionally assign it to a collection and write a short excerpt.
- Publish it.
The title carries extra weight in search, so make it the question a customer would actually ask. "Why is my payment failing?" outperforms "Payment troubleshooting reference".
Content types
| Type | Use it for |
|---|---|
| Article | Standard help articles and documentation |
| FAQ | Short question-and-answer pairs. These also render as an accordion on your help center home page. |
| Blog Post | Longer-form posts |
| Video | A link to a YouTube, Vimeo, or similar video |
| Document | A linked PDF or file |
| Roadmap | Planned work |
Crawled Page is a seventh type, applied automatically to pages picked up by the website scan. It's used as agent context and isn't listed as a browsable article.
Publishing
Only published content is retrievable by the agent and visible in your help center. Unpublish anything that's out of date rather than leaving it live — a wrong answer is worse than no answer.
Embeddings
When you save an article, HelpShelf generates its embedding so semantic search can find it. This takes a few seconds. If you've just added a batch of content and searches aren't finding it yet, give it a moment and check AI search coverage on your agent home.
Writing for an AI agent
A few things matter more than they would for human-only docs:
- One topic per article. Retrieval returns whole articles. An article covering six topics gets retrieved for all six and dilutes every answer.
- Answer in the first paragraph. Put the resolution up top and the caveats below.
- Use your customers' words. If they say "invoice" and you say "billing statement", include both.
- Spell out the implicit. "Click Save" assumes the reader knows which screen they're on. Your agent doesn't.