KB AI search

The default search bar on your help center can find an article by keyword. The AI search lets the visitor ask a question and get an actual answer, with citations.

What the visitor sees

The help-center home page (acme.nura24.com/help) has a prominent search bar with an ✨ Ask AI button. Type a question, click the button (or hit Enter), and a few seconds later an answer appears in a card with:

• The AI's answer to the question.
• A "Sources:" section listing the KB articles it referenced, each clickable to read the full article.

The card sits in place — the visitor stays on the page. There's also a small Or browse articles by keyword → link that triggers the classic keyword search if they prefer.

How it works

1. Visitor's question goes to a MySQL FTS search over published, public articles in their locale.
2. Top 5 matches by relevance form the retrieval context.
3. We send Claude: the question, the 5 articles, and a prompt asking for an answer "based ONLY on the provided articles". Hallucination is constrained by the context.
4. Claude returns an answer string + the IDs of articles it actually cited.
5. We show the answer + linked citations.

If FTS returns no articles, the AI is asked NOT to answer ("we don't have info on this") and instead the card displays "No matches — try contacting us".

Quality is your KB

The answer is only as good as your articles. Garbage in, garbage out. The same rules from Writing articles apply — short, focused, well-tagged articles produce good AI answers.

Privacy

The visitor's question is sent to the LLM (Anthropic). If you can't send customer queries to a third-party model, leave this feature off and stick with keyword search.

We do NOT log the visitor's identity with the question — we don't have one to log. The ai_calls row has the workspace, the feature, and the cost, but no PII.

Cost

Most calls are ~2500 input + 200 output tokens. About $0.004 each. A help-center seeing 100 AI searches a day costs about $0.40.

Off-switch

Settings → AI → uncheck KB AI search. The ✨ Ask AI button still appears but returns "AI search is unavailable". Visitors fall back to the standard keyword search.

When it shines

• KBs with 20+ well-written articles. The AI can pull together info from multiple articles into one answer.
• Conversational visitors who phrase questions in natural language.
• Niche-jargon questions where keyword matching misses the user intent.

When it's worst

• Tiny KBs (under 5 articles) — there's nothing for FTS to find.
• Questions outside your KB scope — the AI says "I don't have info" but the visitor sees a wall instead of a forward to the contact form.