AI that answers from your website, not from imagination

A grounded AI answer is one generated only from material you supplied — your crawled website pages and your approved question-and-answer pairs — rather than from the model's general knowledge. The distinction is the entire safety story of putting AI in front of customers.

An ungrounded model asked "what's your returns window?" will produce a confident, plausible, invented answer. A grounded one either answers from your returns page or admits it does not know. For a shop, the second behaviour is worth far more than the first.

How the step works

The Answer from Knowledge Base step searches your own material for the customer's question, sends an answer built from what it finds, and then branches two ways:

• answered — it found relevant material and replied.
• unanswered — your knowledge base does not cover it.

That second branch is the important one. It is not an error path; it is the normal, expected outcome for anything you have not written down, and it is where you wire a human.

Build it

1. Go to Automations → Knowledge Base and create a collection.
2. Add your website URL and let it crawl. Point it at the pages that answer questions — shipping, returns, sizing, FAQs — not your whole shop.
3. Add question-and-answer pairs by hand for anything not on your site.
4. In a new automation, trigger on Customer Message Received.
5. Add an If Customer Sent condition limited to text, so images and voice notes go to a person instead.
6. Add Answer from Knowledge Base and pick your collection.
7. Wire the unanswered branch to Assign Chat.

What it will and will not know

Why grounding matters commercially, not just ethically

An invented answer is not a neutral failure. If a bot tells a customer they have 30 days to return something and your policy says 14, you have either a complaint or a refund you did not owe. Multiply by the volume automation exists to handle and the downside is larger than the labour saved.

There is a platform dimension too. Answers that annoy customers produce blocks and reports, which move your quality rating, which gates your messaging tier. A bot that confidently misleads people is a slow route to a capped account.

Getting good answers out of it

1. Crawl the pages that answer questions, not the whole site. A knowledge base full of product listings answers policy questions worse than one containing only your policy pages.
2. Write the FAQ pairs your website is missing. Anything you find yourself typing repeatedly in the inbox belongs here.
3. Mine your own chat history. The questions customers actually ask rarely match the ones your FAQ page anticipates.
4. Re-crawl when policies change. A stale crawl answers with last season's returns window, confidently.
5. Read the unanswered branch weekly. Every question that lands there is either a gap in your knowledge base or something that should route elsewhere. This is the single most useful feedback loop in the whole setup.

Where it sits relative to keywords

Keyword rules and knowledge-base answering are complements, not alternatives. Keywords are exact and predictable, so use them for the intents where you want a specific flow — returns, wholesale, order status. The knowledge base is the catch-all underneath, for the long tail of genuine questions.

The ordering that works: specific keyword flows first, knowledge base last, with no keyword condition on it. If you are maintaining an eighty-phrase keyword list for one intent, that intent belongs in the knowledge base instead — keyword triggers that actually match covers where the line falls.

Cost and the window

An AI answer sent to a customer who just messaged you is free text inside an open window, so Meta charges nothing for it under its pricing rules. What it does consume is AI usage on your plan, which is metered per answer. A knowledge base wired to answer every inbound message, including "thanks" and "ok", spends money on nothing — which is another reason for the text-only condition and for putting specific keyword flows above it.

Always leave the door open

Two exits to a human, minimum: the unanswered branch, and an explicit option on any follow-up you send. Customers tolerate a bot that cannot answer. They do not tolerate one they cannot get past. Handover mechanics are in handing a chat from bot to human.