Add your documents

An assistant answers only from the documents you add to it. Help-centre articles, policies, product guides and FAQs all work. Add documents in the Docs section of the assistant, with Add docs.

Four ways to add documents

Upload files

Choose Add docs › Upload files, or drag files onto the Docs page. You can add several files at once.

Format	Extensions
PDF	.pdf (with a text layer)
Word	.docx
Excel	.xlsx
CSV	.csv
Markdown	.md, .mdx
Plain text	.txt

Each file can be up to 10 MB. A file is refused, with a message saying why, when:

• it’s a scanned PDF with no text layer (export a text-based PDF, or paste the text instead);
• it’s a password-protected PDF (upload an unlocked copy);
• it’s empty, or no readable text was found in it;
• its type isn’t on the list above.

The document is named after the file. Snoowl Answers keeps the original file, so you can open it from the Docs list.

Add a web page

Choose Add docs › A web page and enter the Page URL. Snoowl Answers reads that one page as it is now. Links on the page are not followed.

Snoowl Answers keeps the page’s main content and drops the navigation, header, footer, side panels, lists that are mostly links, and sections such as “Related articles” or “Next steps”. The document is named after the page’s title.

The page must:

• start with https:// and be reachable on the public internet;
• answer directly, without a redirect (if the address redirects, use the address it redirects to);
• be an HTML or text page of 2 MB or less, and answer within 20 seconds;
• show its content without JavaScript. Pages that build their text in the browser come in empty.

Add pages from a sitemap

To add many pages at once, choose Add docs › From a sitemap.

1. In Sitemap or site address, enter your sitemap’s address, such as https://help.example.com/sitemap.xml. You can also enter the site’s address: Snoowl Answers then looks for a sitemap in robots.txt, then at /sitemap.xml and /sitemap_index.xml.
2. Select Read. Snoowl Answers reads the sitemap, not the pages, and lists every page on the sitemap’s own site. Pages on other sites, images and files are skipped.
3. Narrow the list with the filter, or with the section buttons such as /billing, and select the pages you want. Pages you’ve already added show Already added.
4. Select Import. The pages are fetched in the background, one every half second, and progress shows above your documents.

When the import finishes, any page that couldn’t be added is listed with its reason, under pages skipped. Only one sitemap import can run for an assistant at a time.

Sitemap limits:

• The address must start with https://.
• A sitemap index is followed one level down, up to 20 sitemaps.
• A sitemap can be up to 5 MB and list up to 5,000 pages.
• Each page follows the same rules as a single web page.

Paste text

Choose Add docs › Paste text, give the document a Name, paste the Text and select Add text. The name is what the assistant shows as the source.

Indexing

Each document is indexed in the background as soon as you add it. Its status in the Docs list shows where it is:

Status	Meaning
Indexing	Being prepared. The assistant doesn’t search this document yet.
Answering	Ready. The assistant answers from this document.
Failed	Indexing didn’t finish. Select Index again on the document to retry.

You can ask questions while other documents are still indexing. The assistant answers from the documents that are ready.

Write documents that answer well

For each question, Snoowl Answers finds the parts of your documents that best answer it, and writes the answer from those. See How answers work. A few habits help the right part be found:

• Give each topic its own heading. A heading such as “Refunds for annual plans” points straight to the answer.
• Put the answer near its heading, in plain sentences.
• Keep one version of each fact. If two documents disagree, the assistant may quote either.

Keeping documents up to date

Snoowl Answers doesn’t fetch web pages again after it adds them. When a page changes, remove the old document and add the page again. A sitemap import skips pages you’ve already added, so remove the changed pages first.

To remove a document, select Remove on it in the Docs list. The assistant stops answering from that document right away.

Limits

An assistant can hold up to 5,000 documents and 20 million characters of text in all. A file, page or sitemap import that would go past either limit is refused or skipped, with a message. See Limits for every limit in one place.