How to prepare your business content for an AI assistant

The assistant inherits your content's problems

Linkd answers from the material you connect to it. That means every gap, every contradiction and every page that was written to impress rather than to inform travels straight through into the answers your customers see.

This is good news, because it makes the work concrete. You are not tuning a model. You are deciding what your business says, writing it down plainly, and putting it where the assistant can read it.

Start from the questions, not the pages

Before you connect anything, spend half an hour listing the questions you already answer. Your sent folder is the best source. So is whoever picks up the phone.

Group them roughly:

• Asked constantly. Hours, pricing, what's included, where you deliver, how returns work. These are the answers worth getting exactly right.
• Asked occasionally. The second question after the obvious one. "Do you do that in my area?" "What happens if it rains?"
• Asked once, by someone who needed a person. Leave these to your team and make sure the assistant can hand off cleanly.

A short list of real questions is more useful than a long audit of your website, because it tells you which pages actually matter.

Write the answer, not the brochure

Most website copy is written to persuade. Answers need to be written to resolve. Compare:

We offer flexible, customer-first returns designed around your peace of mind.

against the way Northline Goods, one of our example retailers, puts it:

Unworn jackets can be returned within 30 days with the tags attached. Final-sale items are excluded.

The second one can be quoted back to a customer. The first one cannot, and an assistant working from it will either sound evasive or start filling in specifics you never wrote.

Keep the qualifiers. "Subject to availability", "in most postcodes", "unless the item was personalised" — those are the parts customers need and the parts marketing copy tends to drop.

One fact, one home

The most common problem is not missing content. It's the same fact stated three times with three different numbers: the old price on a landing page, the new one on the pricing page, a third in a PDF from last year.

Before you connect a source, ask what it is the authority for. If two sources disagree, fix the wrong one or leave it out. Connecting both and hoping the assistant picks correctly is not a strategy.

Choose the right place for each answer

Linkd takes content four ways, and the right choice is usually obvious once you know the difference:

• Website pages for anything that already exists publicly and that you maintain anyway. Crawl the pages you'd be happy to send a customer to.
• Files for the documents people genuinely ask for — a service menu, a specification sheet, a course outline. Upload the current version, not the folder.
• Text snippets for the things you say constantly that have never been written down. Cedarline, our example fencing contractor, might paste its service area as plain text long before it gets around to building a coverage page.
• Q&A pairs for a question that has one correct answer you want given the same way every time. Harbour House, our example hotel, would write check-in time and parking cost this way rather than hope they're extracted cleanly from a long arrivals page.

Decide what you don't want it to answer

This is the part people skip. The assistant can only answer from what you connect, so omission is your main control.

Leave out anything behind a login, anything containing personal data about a customer or an employee, anything you'd need a professional to sign off on, and anything that changes faster than you can keep it updated. If an answer would commit you to something — a quote, an eligibility decision, a guarantee — it belongs with a person, not in a knowledge base.

Then write the handoff deliberately. "I couldn't find that in the business information available to me, you can contact the team and they'll confirm" is a perfectly good answer. It's far better than a confident wrong one.

A reasonable first pass

You do not need to get everything in before you start.

1. Connect the five or ten pages that answer your most common questions.
2. Write Q&A pairs for the three questions your website genuinely does not answer today.
3. Upload the one document people always ask you to email them.
4. Test it, see where it falls over, and add from there.

A small, accurate set of sources beats a complete one you haven't read. You can always add more; you can't easily un-say a wrong answer.

Next: how to test customer questions before launch.