What a citation is
When Vex answers from something you wrote, it can put a link to that page straight into its reply — "Based on our billing guide, here's what I found: [read more]." That link is a citation, and the visitor can click it to read the whole thing. Vex weaves them into the sentence rather than listing them as footnotes.
Which sources produce a link, and which cannot
Two kinds of content can be cited: knowledge base articles and documentation pages. Both have a real page on your public site, so there is somewhere to send the visitor.
Everything else your brand knows still gets used in the answer, but produces no link: uploaded files, pasted text, question-and-answer entries and the pages of your website we read for you. There is no public page of ours to point at for those, so Vex answers without a citation rather than inventing a link.
Renaming your web address no longer breaks the links
This is the part worth knowing if you have ever hesitated over a rename. The link is now built at the moment Vex writes the answer, using whatever address your brand has right then. Change it at Brand settings → Public address and the very next answer uses the new one. It costs nothing and nothing has to be re-processed.
It did not used to work that way. The address was baked into your content when it was processed, so a rename broke every link the AI had already learnt, and the only repair was re-processing — and re-paying for — the whole knowledge base. Content that was indexed before the change is silently re-pointed at your current address, so there was nothing for you to redo.
One thing a rename still breaks, and always will: links other people copied and saved somewhere else. That is outside anything we can rewrite.
If your brand has no public web address
Then Vex cites nothing at all, rather than quoting a link that leads nowhere. The answer itself is unaffected. To check what your brand has, look at the strip across the top of Brand → Knowledge — it names your public address and what is currently served on it, or warns you that there is no address yet.
Publish, don't draft
A draft is not just uncitable — it is invisible. Publishing an article is what puts it in front of the AI in the first place, and it happens straight away, with no chatbot and no widget involved. If Vex never mentions an article you are sure you wrote, the first thing to check is whether it is actually published.
Making citations worth clicking
- Write focused articles. One topic per article means Vex cites the right one, instead of a sprawling page where the relevant part is buried.
- Use descriptive titles. The title is what shows up in the link. "How to update your payment method" beats "Billing FAQ".
- Keep them current. A citation to a stale article costs you more trust than no citation at all.
When Vex cites an article that does not match
Vex cites the article it found most relevant to the question, which is not always the one it took every word from. If the citation regularly does not match the answer, the usual cause is an article covering two unrelated topics — the search cannot tell which half it matched. Split it in two.
Next step
See which questions produced no good answer at all, and what to write next: Find knowledge gaps Vex couldn't answer.