My agent gives wrong or outdated answers

August 26, 20260 views

Work through this in order. The cause is nearly always one of the first three.

1. Is the information anywhere the agent can see it?

Your agent answers from your business profile, your operating hours and your knowledge base. If a fact lives only in your head, or only in an email, the agent cannot know it.

Check Knowledge Base and search your live version for the fact. If it isn't there, add it — a Q&A pair is the most reliable format for a specific question.

2. Is your latest version actually live?

Adding sources is not the same as publishing them. In Knowledge Base, confirm the version containing your change shows Live and not Processing, Draft or Failed.

Only one version powers your agents at a time. If an older version is live, your change is not in play.

3. Did you change a file and expect a refresh to pick it up?

Refresh re-reads URLs, text sections and Q&A only. Uploaded files are never re-read. If a document changed, upload the new file and publish a new version.

4. Is the old information still somewhere else?

This catches people out: if you crawled your website and the old price is still on a page you crawled, the agent has both the old and the new answer and may use either. Fix the page, then refresh — or remove that URL from your sources.

5. Is it a tone problem rather than a facts problem?

If the facts are right but the answer is too long, too formal or goes off-topic, that is Custom Instructions under Settings → AI Tools, not the knowledge base. Short, concrete rules work best.

6. Test the fix properly

Use Try Chatbot and ask the question the way a customer would, not the way you would. If the answer is right there but wrong on your website, you may be looking at a cached page — check in a private window.

If it still answers wrongly

Contact TalkRev support with the exact question asked, the answer you got, and the answer you expected. Those three lines let us reproduce it straight away.

Was this article helpful?

Your feedback helps us improve our documentation