FAQ and manual text
When a hand-written Q&A pair beats a document, when to paste manual text instead, and the character limits that apply to each of them.
Two source types hold content you write yourself: FAQ pairs and manual text. They look similar and behave differently.
FAQ pairs
An FAQ source is one question and one answer, with an optional category.
| Field | Limit |
|---|---|
| Question | ≤ 500 chars |
| Answer | ≤ 10,000 chars |
| Category | ≤ 120 chars |
FAQ content is boosted in retrieval: when a visitor's question matches an FAQ, that pair is favoured over an ordinary passage from a long document. That makes an FAQ the right tool for one specific problem — a question the agent keeps getting wrong, or one where the answer must be phrased exactly.
The fastest fix for a bad answer is an FAQ pair. Take the visitor's question verbatim from the transcript, write the answer you wanted, and add it. Phrase the question the way customers phrase it, not the way your team does.
Write one question per source. Bundling five questions into one FAQ defeats the boost, because the pair now matches all five topics weakly instead of one strongly.
Manual text
A manual source is a title and a body of free text, up to 100,000 characters. It is chunked like any document.
Use it for content that exists nowhere else in a fetchable form: internal policies, a price list kept in a spreadsheet, notes from your team, or the text of a page that sits behind a login and so cannot be crawled.
Which to use
| Situation | Use |
|---|---|
| One question, one answer, phrasing matters | FAQ |
| Correcting a specific wrong answer | FAQ |
| A policy, a process, or several related facts | Manual text |
| Content that already exists on your site | URL |
| Content that already exists as a document | File |
Both types can be edited in place after they are added; saving re-processes the source. Both count against your plan's knowledge-source limit.
Where to go next
- Knowledge gaps — the list of questions
your chatbot could not answer, which is where most good FAQ pairs come from.
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