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Most knowledge problems come down to one of four things: the article is not published, its folder is not connected to the agent, the agent’s change was never published, or the fact is not in a passage the search can find. Work through the checks below in order.

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The agent ignores an article

Open it from Agents → Knowledge. If the header says Draft — not visible to your AI yet, click Publish. If it says Last published by …, remember that only the published version counts: edits you made since are still a draft.
Open the agent under Agents and check the Knowledge Base card. The folder that contains the article must be turned on. If several agents handle your channels, check the one connected to the channel the conversation came in on.
Connecting a folder is a draft change on the agent. If the header still shows Publish changes, live conversations are using the previous setup. Click it and publish. See Test and publish.
Click Preview on the article. The AI matches passages, not whole articles. If the sentence you expect the agent to use sits in a passage full of other topics, give it its own heading or its own article, publish, and test again with Test Agent.
The agent reads each folder’s description to decide which folder to search. Rename the folder (⋯ → Rename) and write a description that names the topics inside it. Publish the agent again afterwards.
Instructions that tell the agent to keep answers short, stay on products, or never discuss a topic can stop it from searching. Review them with Writing agent instructions.
To see what really happened, open the conversation in the Inbox and click Sources (N) (or Knowledge Base) under the reply. Knowledge used lists the articles the agent cited, or the folder it searched when nothing was cited; no button at all means the agent did not search knowledge for that reply.

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The agent gives outdated answers

  • The agent uses the last published version. Open the article and click History to see which version is live and when it was published. If your correction is sitting in a draft, click Publish.
  • Right after publishing, the previous version stays live for a moment while the new one is prepared. Give it a minute and test again.
  • Imported pages and documents are a copy taken at import time. When your website changes, the article does not update itself: edit the article and publish, or import the page again and delete the old one.
  • Pages captured during onboarding are live from the start with the text your website had at that time. If that page is now wrong, delete the article and import the page again from its link, or write the correct version as a new article and delete the old one.
  • Two articles that contradict each other can both be matched. Search the Knowledge page for the topic and delete or merge duplicates.
Popcorn fetches one page per import; links inside the page are not followed. Import each page separately.

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Uploading a document fails

  • Supported types are PDF, Word (.doc, .docx), plain text, CSV, JSON and HTML, up to 20 MB. Other types are refused with The uploaded file type is not allowed for this purpose, and a failed upload shows Couldn’t upload the file. Please try again.
  • The file appears to have no readable text. means no text could be extracted. Scanned PDFs are images, not text; export the document with text or paste the content.
  • Reading that document is taking too long — please try again means extraction passed 25 seconds. Split the document or try again.

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A folder name is rejected

Folder names must use English letters, numbers and common symbols, stay within 49 characters once spaces and symbols are removed, be unique in your workspace, and not consist only of a reserved word (system, admin, root, api, function, call, execute, eval, class, constructor, prototype). The dialog stays open so you can change the name and try again. Descriptions have no such rules and can be in any language, including Arabic.

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I cannot publish

  • Publish is disabled with You don’t have permission to publish when your role lacks the Publish permission on the Knowledge Base. Owners, Admins and Managers have it; Agents and Viewers do not. Ask an Owner or Admin to publish or to change your role under Settings → Roles & Permissions. See Team and roles.
  • Restore is disabled with You don’t have permission to restore versions when your role lacks the Edit permission.
  • Couldn’t publish this article with no further detail: the dialog stays open so you can retry. If it keeps failing, save the draft, reload the page and try again.

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Restore replaced my draft

Restore in Version history creates a new draft from the chosen version and replaces the draft you had. Popcorn warns before doing so when you have a draft in progress. The published version is untouched, so nothing changed for customers; use Compare to see what differed and re-apply your edits.

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An article or folder is gone

  • Deleting an article or a folder is permanent and removes the content from the AI immediately. There is no trash. If it was imported, import it again; if it was written in Popcorn, rewrite it.
  • This article couldn’t be found. on an article page means it was deleted, or the link belongs to a different workspace.

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Still stuck?

Ask Ask Nour in the sidebar, or write to support with the article title, the agent name, and a link to the conversation where the answer went wrong.