The short version
- Customers write in when they can’t find an answer, or don’t trust the one they found.
- An answer that cites the page it came from can be checked in one click. That is what earns trust.
- When the docs don’t say, the assistant says so, and the question becomes part of your writing plan.
- Each reader gets answers only from pages they are allowed to open.
- Ask AI is in beta. It answers only from your published docs, never the open web.
Why the same questions keep coming
Look at last month’s tickets and most of them are not new. The same handful of questions arrive again and again, in different words, from different people. Your team answers each one by hand, usually by pasting a link to a page that already exists.
Customers write in for one of three reasons: they couldn’t find the page, they found it but didn’t trust it, or the page doesn’t exist. A search box only helps with the first. The other two need answers people can check, and a way to see what isn’t written yet.
Use your own numbers. The model only multiplies them.
Tickets whose answer is written down, or could be.
Customers who try the help centre before writing in.
Your answered rate, shown on the Ask overview.
Answered before a ticket
168a month
Time your team gets back
34hours
- Tickets a month2,000
- Answer is in the docs700
- Asked the docs first280
- Answered before a ticket168
Where ten more points matter most
- Answer is in the docs+48 a month
- Ask the docs first+42 a month
- Answered with a source+28 a month
Whatever numbers you try, the last stage is the one you control: how often the assistant can actually answer. That depends on what is written, which is why the rest of this guide is mostly about the docs, not the bot.
Answers that show their sources
A customer has no reason to believe a chatbot. They have every reason to believe your documentation, if they can see that’s where the answer came from. So every claim in an answer carries a citation to the page it was taken from, and the reader can open it.
How much the assistant says in its own words is a choice you make per site. Some teams want a short explanation; some want the docs quoted exactly as written, with no paraphrase at all.
The default. Good when customers often want to read further.
Can I change the date I’m billed on?
Yes. An account owner can move the billing date once per billing period, from Settings › Billing1. The next invoice is prorated for the days between the old and the new date2.
Read further
- Billing › Change your billing date
- Billing › How proration works
When the docs fall short
The real test of an assistant is the question your docs can’t answer. A confident wrong answer costs more than no answer: the customer acts on it, and then writes in angry.
Gravity’s assistant does not fill gaps. It answers what the docs cover, says plainly what they don’t, and points to the closest pages. Questions that aren’t about your product, and topics you’ve chosen to keep for people, are declined with your own message.
“Why did my two-step code stop working on a new phone?”
Your docs don’t answer this yet. These pages are the closest match:
- Account › Sign-in options
- Security › Two-step verification
What your team sees. No answer is invented. The question joins a topic in Gaps, next to everyone who asked it differently.
Unanswered questions are a writing plan
Every question the docs couldn’t answer, every partial answer and every thumbs-down is kept and grouped into topics by what it means, not the words used. Each topic shows how many people asked, a few of their questions, and a suggested title for the page that would answer it.
That list is a writing plan your customers wrote for you. The useful habit is a short weekly triage: write the most-asked topics first, dismiss the ones that need a person rather than a page, and mark a topic resolved once its page is published.
This week’s plan would answer
79 of 146 questions54%
- 48 askedPlanned
- 31 askedPlanned
- 22 askedOpen
- 17 askedOpen
- 12 askedOpen
- 9 askedOpen
- 7 askedOpen
The questions nobody could answer are the most honest roadmap your docs will ever get.
The right answer for each reader
Not every customer should get the same answer. A partner has different limits from a visitor; an internal runbook should never reach a customer at all. The assistant follows the same visibility as the docs site: it can only use a page the reader could open themselves.
That also means a visitor may get a partial answer where a signed-in customer gets a full one. That is the correct behaviour, and it is visible: the answer says what it couldn’t cover.
“How do I raise my API rate limit?”
Answer for a visitor · Partly answered
Each API key can make 100 requests a minute1. The pages available to you don’t say how to raise it.
What to measure
Ticket volume moves for many reasons, so don’t judge the docs by it alone. Watch the numbers the docs control directly: how often questions are answered, whether readers found the answers helpful, how many went unanswered, and what people searched for and didn’t find.
- What it counts
- The share of questions the assistant answered fully from your docs, with sources.
- What moves it
- Rises as you write the pages Gaps asks for. Falls when a release adds things the docs don’t cover yet.
- What to do
- If it drops after a launch, open Gaps and look for topics that appeared that week.
Rolling it out
Start inside your own team, where a weak answer costs nothing. Then turn it on for one site, set the limits you’re comfortable with, and settle into a weekly rhythm. Each stage is useful on its own.
- Ask your twenty most common ticket questions from search inside Gravity.
- Read every answer and its sources in Reviews.
- Fix or write the pages behind the weak answers before any customer sees them.
- Ask AI on the siteOffReaders see nothing yet.
- Members asking in GravityAvailableYour team asks from search, across everything they can read.
Questions support teams ask
It answers only from passages of your published pages that the reader is allowed to open, and every claim carries a citation to one of them. If nothing fits, the answer is “your docs don’t say”, with the closest pages.
The one exception is a setting you choose: off-topic questions can be allowed, and those are answered from general knowledge with no citation. It is off by default.
Further reading
The assistant, search and Gaps in detail: AI and search. How every page is approved before readers see it: Review and publish. Audiences, your domain and reader analytics: Publishing and brand.