How Vex finds answers
What actually happens between a visitor's question and Vex's reply — one search across everything the brand owns, in every language it is written in, with prices read live and links built fresh. Plus what to check when Vex ignores something you added.
You do not configure any of this. It is worth understanding anyway, because it explains why an answer came out the way it did, and what to change when it comes out wrong.
One search, over everything the brand owns
When a question arrives, Vex runs a single search across everything attached to that brand — its knowledge bases, its documentation, its uploaded files, the website pages we have read for you, your question-and-answer pairs and your product catalogue. There is no per-source setting deciding what is searched; if it is on Brand → Knowledge and it is indexed, it is in scope.
The same search backs every place the brand's AI speaks:
- the chat widget
- phone calls taken by its voice agent
- the suggested replies your team sees in the inbox
- answers assembled from your API tools
- the AI social posts it writes
That is why adding one article improves all of them at once, and why a gap shows up everywhere at once too.
Several languages at once
Search has two halves: a meaning-based half, which is naturally multilingual, and a keyword half, which has to be told which language's grammar rules to apply.
The keyword half is run in every language the brand's sources are written in, up to three. A brand holding an English knowledge base and a Hungarian one keeps full recall in both at the same time — a Hungarian question still matches the Hungarian articles properly, instead of being parsed with English rules and half-missing.
The brand's own language always goes first, and it is the fallback for anything that carries no language of its own: uploaded files, scraped website pages and Q&A entries.
Links inside answers are built fresh
When Vex points a visitor at one of your articles, it does not repeat a link that was stored when the article was indexed. It looks up the brand's web address at the moment it answers and builds the link then.
The practical consequence: changing your public web address never leaves a stale link buried inside an AI reply. Links people have already saved elsewhere still break — that part is unavoidable, and Your public web address explains it — but nothing Vex says from that point on is wrong.
Prices and stock are read live
Product prices, sale prices and availability are deliberately not stored in the search index. They are read from your catalogue at the moment the answer is written and put into the text handed to the model.
Swapping content leaves no ghosts
If you take a knowledge base down, swap another one in, or move a source to a different brand, the old content stops answering immediately. It is not remembered, and it does not keep surfacing in replies after it has gone.
Why isn't Vex using this?
When something you added is not showing up in answers, work down this list. The first two columns of Brand → Knowledge answer most cases on their own.
Is it published?
An unpublished article or page is a draft: not shown to anyone, and not indexed. Publishing it indexes it straight away. Knowledge base categories have no Published switch — only the articles inside them do.
Does the Indexed column show a number?
Indexed is how many searchable pieces have been stored from that source. A dash means nothing has been stored yet, so there is nothing for Vex to find. A large article normally becomes several pieces.
Is the source on the right brand?
Check you are looking at the brand whose AI you are testing. Content added to one brand is invisible to the others.
Have you hit the indexing cap?
Free accounts, and accounts that bought individual modules only, share a fixed number of indexed items across the whole organisation. At the cap, new content stops being indexed until you remove something or upgrade — the count is shown at the top of Brand → Knowledge.
Is the question actually about that text?
Open Brand → Vex → Reports, find the answer, and expand its Steps. The knowledge-search step shows the exact query Vex ran and what it matched, with a relevance score. That is the fastest way to tell "nothing matched" apart from "the wrong thing matched" — and the two need different fixes.