Importing knowledge sources to power generative replies in AI agents (AI agents - Advanced only)


Knowledge sources are the information your AI agent uses to create AI-generated answers to questions from your customers. Adding knowledge sources to your AI agent lets it generate answers to help customers without requiring you to script every response.


What's my plan?







Add-on

AI agents - Advanced











This article applies only to customers who bought AI agents
- Advanced before March 10, 2026. Otherwise, see
Connecting knowledge sources to power generative
replies in AI agents.

Knowledge sources are the information your AI agent uses to create AI-generated answers
to questions from your customers. Adding knowledge sources to your AI agent lets it
generate answers to help customers without requiring you to script every response.
This article contains the following topics:

About knowledge sources
Importing a Zendesk help center
Importing a Salesforce help center
Importing a Freshdesk help center
Importing a Confluence site or space
Importing a CSV file
Importing content with a web crawler

Related article:

Configuring search rules for knowledge sources
for AI agents
Managing imported knowledge sources for AI agents
(AI agents - Advanced only)



About knowledge sources

You can import the following different types of knowledge source into an advanced AI
agent:


Help centers: Web-based help centers powered by Zendesk, Salesforce, or
Freshdesk.

Confluence: Confluence sites or spaces that your organization uses to
store content.

CSV files: CSV files formatted with article information. Importing CSV
files is a good solution for importing knowledge bases that aren't natively
supported or that are protected by single sign-on (SSO).


Content imported with a web crawler: Information from a webpage or set of
webpages. This option is best suited for importing information from a
knowledge base, FAQ, or product description page. It is less suited to
e-commerce web shops. For e-commerce pages, Zendesk recommends building an integration capable of
retrieving relevant product information and adding that information in a
dialogue or generative procedure.


You can add multiple knowledge sources to a single AI agent. For example, you can
import articles from multiple Zendesk help centers, multiple CSV files, or a
combination of both. Nevertheless, we recommend keeping the overall number of
knowledge sources within a reasonable limit. Having lots of sources can in some
cases lead to reduced accuracy and increased latency.
It’s important to understand that your AI agent doesn't search live data in a help
center, file, or website. Instead, the information is imported into the AI agent on
a one-time or recurring basis. The AI agent uses this imported information when
generating its replies.



Importing a Zendesk help center

Client admins can import a Zendesk help center.
To import a Zendesk help center

In the AI agents workspace, select the AI agent you want to work
with.
Click
Content in the sidebar, then select Knowledge sources.
Click Add source. The Add source pane opens.

In Type, select Zendesk.
In Help center URL, enter your subdomain, including the help center
locale (for example, https://yoursubdomain.zendesk.com/hc/en-us). If
you don't provide a locale, the help center's default locale is
uploaded.

In Source name, enter a name for your source. This name is used in
reporting within the AI agents reporting dashboard.

In Import frequency, select how often the help center content should be
reimported:

Daily: Content is reimported every day excluding Sundays and the
15th of the month. Not recommended unless your knowledge source is
updated very frequently.

Weekly: Content is reimported each week on Sunday.

Monthly: Content is reimported on the 15th of each month.

Never: Content is imported once and is never reimported. The
exact timing of a reimport isn't guaranteed. The reimport is
processed during the day it's scheduled for, but might not always be
ready at a consistent time.
Regular reimporting keeps the AI
agent up to date. For most organizations, a weekly or monthly
cadence is fine. Remember that you can always manually reimport if
new changes need to be reflected outside the scheduled reimport.




If your help center requires users to sign in, or if you otherwise want to
import restricted articles:
Toggle Import private articles on.
In Email, enter the email address of a user authorized to access
the restricted content. This is typically the email address of a
Knowledge admin.

In API access token, enter an API token that you generate
for this purpose.


Click Import.



Note: When importing restricted articles, if the email or API
token is incorrect, no warnings or errors are presented. Instead, only public
articles are imported, not restricted articles. It's highly recommended to
double-check the credentials before importing and test that the AI agent can
answer questions using restricted articles after the import has finished.




Importing a Salesforce help center

Client admins can import a Salesforce help center.
To import a Salesforce help center

In the AI agents workspace, select the AI agent you want to work
with.
Click
Content in the sidebar, then select Knowledge sources.
Click Add source. The Add source pane opens.

In Type, select Salesforce.
Click Sign in to Salesforce.
Log in to your Salesforce environment.
In Help center URL, enter the full URL of your Salesforce help
center.
In Source name, enter a name for your source. This name is used in
reporting within the AI agents reporting dashboard.

In Import frequency, select how often the help center content should be
reimported:

Daily: Content is reimported every day excluding Sundays and the
15th of the month. Not recommended unless your knowledge source is
updated very frequently.

Weekly: Content is reimported each week on Sunday.

Monthly: Content is reimported on the 15th of each month.

Never: Content is imported once and is never reimported. The
exact timing of a reimport isn't guaranteed. The reimport is
processed during the day it's scheduled for, but might not always be
ready at a consistent time.
Regular reimporting keeps the AI
agent up to date. For most organizations, a weekly or monthly
cadence is fine. Remember that you can always manually reimport if
new changes need to be reflected outside the scheduled
reimport.



Click Import.




Importing a Freshdesk help center

Client admins can import a Freshdesk help center.
To import a Freshdesk help center

In the AI agents workspace, select the AI agent you want to work
with.
Click
Content in the sidebar, then select Knowledge sources.
Click Add source. The Add source pane opens.

In Type, select Freshdesk.
In Help center URL, enter the full URL of your Freshdesk help
center. You can add your whole help center, or only a certain section of
your help center.

In Source name, enter a name for your source. This name is used in
reporting within the AI agents reporting dashboard.

In Import frequency, select how often the help center content should be
reimported:

Daily: Content is reimported every day excluding Sundays and the
15th of the month. Not recommended unless your knowledge source is
updated very frequently.

Weekly: Content is reimported each week on Sunday.

Monthly: Content is reimported on the 15th of each month.

Never: Content is imported once and is never reimported. The
exact timing of a reimport isn't guaranteed. The reimport is
processed during the day it's scheduled for, but might not always be
ready at a consistent time.
Regular reimporting keeps the AI
agent up to date. For most organizations, a weekly or monthly
cadence is fine. Remember that you can always manually reimport if
new changes need to be reflected outside the scheduled
reimport.



In API access token, enter an API token that you generate in Freshdesk
for this purpose.
Click Import.




Importing a Confluence site or space

Client admins can import a Confluence site or space.
Confluence connections are created and managed in Knowledge. You must create a Confluence connection in Knowledge before you
can connect a Confluence site or space to your AI agent.
Unlike other knowledge sources for AI agents, you can’t specify a reimport frequency
for Confluence content. Confluence connections automatically sync every 24 hours,
but you can manually resync the content if needed.
To import a Confluence site or space


In the AI agents workspace, select the AI agent you want to work
with.
Click
Content in the sidebar, then select Knowledge sources.
Click Add source. The Add source pane opens.

In Type, select Confluence.

In Domain, enter the URL of your Zendesk subdomain (for example,
https://yoursubdomain.zendesk.com).
In Email, enter the email address of a Zendesk admin.
In API access token, enter an API token that you generate for
this purpose.
Click Authorize.
Select a Confluence site or space that’s already been connected to your
Zendesk account, or create a new Confluence
connection. You can select more than one.


Click Save.


The Confluence site or space you selected is added to your list of knowledge sources.




Importing a CSV file

Client admins can import a CSV file as a knowledge source.
To import a CSV file


In the AI agents workspace, select the AI agent you want to work
with.
Click
Content in the sidebar, then select Knowledge sources.
Click Add source. The Add source pane opens.

In Type, select File (CSV).
Click Select knowledge source CSV file.
Select the CSV file you want to import. See Required formatting for the CSV file to ensure your file is
properly formatted.

In Source name, enter a name for your source. This name is used in
reporting within the AI agents reporting dashboard.


Click Import.




Note: CSV files cannot be reimported automatically. If your
content changes, you need to update the CSV file or create a new one and import
it again.



Required formatting for the CSV file

The CSV file you upload as a knowledge source must have one row for each article
you want to import. The file must include the following columns:


title: The title of the article.

content: The full content of the article.
The content can contain HTML tags, so there's no need to strip those
out. In fact, tags can help as they give structure to the articles,
and that structure helps the AI agent understand the article
sections.
The content can also contain Markdown, but the Markdown must be
valid or else the content of that cell will not be imported.
Additionally, if the Markdown has been written in such a way that
the cell is a single line of more than 2,000 characters, importing
the cell fails without showing any warnings.



You can also include the following optional columns:


labels: A list of label names separated by a space. The values can be
anything you want to categorize content by.

locale: Used to organize articles by language or market. While the
values can technically be anything, it's recommended to follow standard
locale notation (for example, en-US or fi-FI).

article_url: The external web address where the article can be found.
This is used in source attribution in the widget and reporting within the AI
agents reporting dashboard.

The file format must also use:

Commas (,) as a column separator and double quotes (") as the string quote
character.
The first row for column headers.
ASCII characters only. CSV files fail to import if they contain any
non-ASCII characters.

You can download a template at the bottom of this article.




Importing content with a web crawler

Client admins can import website content using a web crawler.
For more information about web crawler imports, see Best practices for using a web crawler to import content for AI
agents and Troubleshooting issues with web crawler imports for AI
agents.


Note: Currently, you can't use the web crawler on a site
protected by single sign-on (SSO). Instead, you can import a CSV file.

To import web-crawled content


In the AI agents workspace, select the AI agent you want to work
with.
Click
Content in the sidebar, then select Knowledge sources.
Click Add source. The Add source pane opens.

In Type, select Web crawler.
In Source name, enter a name for your source. This name is used in
reporting within the AI agents reporting dashboard.

Select Crawl exact URL if you want the web crawler to import
information only from webpages listed in the Start URLs field, not including
any sub-pages. When this option is not selected, the web crawler applies
a maximum crawling depth of 15 sub-pages for any URLs listed in Start
URLs.

In Start URLs, enter the URLs you want the web crawler to go
through. List each URL on a separate line. You can use an asterisk (*)
to denote wildcard values. If you do, note that the pattern
https://example.com/path/** will:

Match the following URLs:

https://example.com/path/ (trailing slash)
https://example.com/path/subpage


Not match the following URL:

https://example.com/path (no trailing slash)



As a workaround, you can use both the exact URL
(https://example.com/path) and the wildcard
(https://example.com/path/**).

In Import frequency, select how often the crawled content should be
reimported:

Daily: Content is reimported every day excluding Sundays and
the 15th of the month. Not recommended unless your knowledge source
is updated very frequently.

Weekly: Content is reimported each week on Sunday.

Monthly: Content is reimported on the 15th of each
month.

Never: Content is imported once and is never reimported.
The exact timing of a reimport isn't guaranteed. The reimport
is processed during the day it's scheduled for, but might not
always be ready at a consistent time.
Regular reimporting
keeps the AI agent up to date. For most organizations, a weekly
or monthly cadence is fine. Remember that you can always
manually reimport if new changes need to be reflected outside
the scheduled reimport.




(Optional) Expand Crawler settings to configure advanced crawler
settings. See Configuring advanced crawler settings for
details.

Note: These settings are recommended
only for organizations with complex technical requirements. Many
organizations do not need these settings.

(Optional) Expand HTML processing to configure advanced HTML
settings. See Configuring advanced HTML settings for
details.

Note: These settings are recommended
only for organizations with complex technical requirements. Many
organizations do not need these settings.

Click Import.




Configuring advanced crawler settings




Under the Crawler settings
heading, in Crawler type, select one of the following
options:

Adaptive switching between browser and raw HTTP
(Default): Fast and renders JavaScript content if present.

Headless browser (Firefox + Playwright): Reliable,
renders JavaScript content, best in avoiding blocking, but might
be slow.

Raw HTTP client (Cheerio): Fastest, but doesn’t render
JavaScript content.

Raw with JavaScript: Crawl the page as if using
JavaScript.


Select Include URLs or Exclude URLs to customize the
crawling scope set in the Start URLs field above. In the field below
each setting, enter the URLs you want to include or exclude. Enter
each URL on its own line.
These settings affect only the links
found while crawling sub-pages. If you want to crawl a page, make sure
to specify its URL in the Start URLs field. For example, if the URL
structure is inconsistent as in the example below:

Start URL:
https://support.example.com/en/support/home

Article URL:
https://support.example.com/en/support/solutions/articles/…


You can add the following URL in the Include URLs field:

https://support.example.com/en/support/**


This way, the web crawler will include all of the articles, even
though their path is different from the starting URL.
As another
example, the following page is very broad and includes irrelevant pages
(for example, the careers page):
Start URL: https://www.example.com/en


To exclude these irrelevant pages, you can add the following URL in
the Exclude URLs field:
https://www.example.com/en/careers/**

This way, the web crawler will exclude all of the content from the
careers page and its sub-pages.
Tip: More powerful than plain text, globs are patterns that let
you use special characters to create dynamic URLs for the web
crawler to search. Here are a few examples:

https://support.example.com/** lets the
crawler access all URLs starting with
https://support.example.com/.

https://{store,docs}.example.com/** lets
the crawler access all URLs starting with
https://store.example.com/ or https://docs.example.com/.

https://example.com/**/*\?*foo=* allows the
crawler to access all URLs that contain foo query parameters
with any value.

Learn more about globs and test them on the DigitalOcean
website.

In Max pages to crawl, enter the maximum number of pages the web
crawler will go through, including the starting URL. This includes the
starting URL, pagination pages, pages with no content, and more. The
web crawler will automatically stop after reaching this
limit.

In Max crawling depth, enter the maximum number of links the web
crawler will follow from the starting URL. The starting URL has a
depth of 0. Pages linked directly from the starting URL have a depth
of 1, and so on. Use this setting to prevent accidental web crawler
runaway.

In Proxy configuration, select one of the following options:

Datacenter (Default): Fastest method to scrape data.

Residential: Reduced performance, but less likely to be
blocked. Ideal for when the default proxy is blocked or when you
need to crawl from a specific country.








Configuring advanced HTML settings




Under the HTML processing
heading, in Keep HTML elements, enter a CSS selector
to keep only specified HTML elements. All other content will be
removed, helping you focus only on relevant information.

In Remove HTML elements, choose which HTML elements to remove
before converting to text, Markdown, or saving as HTML. This helps
exclude unwanted content.

In Expand clickable elements, enter a valid CSS selector matching
DOM elements that will be clicked. This is useful for expanding
collapsed sections in order to capture their text content.

In HTML transformer, select one of the following values to define
how to clean up the HTML to keep only important content and remove
extraneous content (for example, navigation or pop-ups):

Extractus: (Not recommended) Uses the Extractus library.

None: Removes only the HTML elements specified in the
Remove HTML elements option above.

Readable text: Uses Mozilla's Readability library to
extract the main article content, removing navigation, headers,
footers, and other non-essential elements. Works best for
article-rich websites and blogs.

Readable text if possible: Uses Mozilla's Readability
library to extract the main content, but falls back to the
original HTML if the page doesn't appear to be an article. This
is useful for websites with mixed content types, such as
articles or product pages, as it preserves more content on
non-article pages.



In Wait for dynamic content, enter the number of seconds the
crawler should wait for dynamic content to load. By default, it waits
five seconds or until the page finishes loading, whichever comes
first.
In Soft wait for selector, enter CSS selectors for HTML elements
that the crawler should wait to load before extracting content. If the
selected element isn't present, the crawler still crawls that
page.
List each CSS selector on a separate line.

In Wait for selector, enter CSS selectors for HTML elements that
the crawler must wait to load before extracting content. If the
selected element isn't present, the crawler doesn't crawl that
page.
List each CSS selector on a separate line.

In Max scroll height, enter the maximum number of pixels the
crawler should scroll. The crawler scrolls the page to load more
content until the network is idle or this scroll height is reached.
Set this to 0 to disable scrolling completely.
This setting
doesn't apply when using the raw HTTP client, as it doesn't run
JavaScript or load dynamic content.

In Make containers sticky, enter CSS selectors for HTML elements
where child content should be kept, even if it's hidden. List each CSS
selector on a separate line.
This is helpful when using the
Expand clickable elements option on pages that remove hidden content
from the page entirely.







{
"@context": "https://schema.org",
"@type": "TechArticle",
"@id": "https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/10791195957530",
"url": "https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/10791195957530",
"headline": "Importing knowledge sources to power generative replies in AI agents (AI agents - Advanced only)",
"description": "You can import various types of knowledge sources such as help centers, Confluence sites, CSV files, or web-crawled content into an advanced AI agent to enable it to generate AI-powered replies based on imported information rather than live data.",
"articleSection": "Configuring generative replies in AI agents",
"datePublished": "2026-05-19T17:39:53+00:00",
"dateModified": "2026-05-19T18:17:19.338488+00:00",
"inLanguage": "en-US",
"mainEntityOfPage": {
"@type": "WebPage",
"@id": "https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/10791195957530"
},
"author": {
"@type": "Organization",
"name": "Zendesk",
"@id": "https://www.zendesk.com"
},
"publisher": {
"@type": "Organization",
"name": "Zendesk",
"@id": "https://www.zendesk.com"
},
"isPartOf": {
"@type": "WebSite",
"name": "Zendesk Help",
"@id": "https://support.zendesk.com/hc/"
},
"about": {
"@type": "SoftwareApplication",
"name": "Zendesk",
"@id": "https://www.zendesk.com",
"softwareAddOn": {
"@type": "SoftwareApplication",
"name": "AI agents",
"@id": "https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/sections/8988994355994"
}
}
}
