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Build your agent

Strict Knowledge Mode

Strict Knowledge Mode is a per-agent guarantee: the agent answers only from your own knowledge. When a visitor asks something your knowledge base can't ground, the agent returns a fixed fallback message instead of letting the language model answer from its general training — which is where invented, off-brand "facts" come from.

Why this exists
A sales bot answers as your business. Without strict mode, a question like "do you offer moving services?" on a storage-rental site can produce a confident, entirely fabricated "yes — we offer packing and trucks too." Strict mode makes that impossible: with no grounded source, the model is never called.

How to enable

Open the agent's settings page (/app/agents/{id}/settings), find the Strict Knowledge Mode section, and toggle Only answer from my knowledge. The change takes effect immediately — there's no separate publish step.

Strict mode is on by default: every agent that existed when this shipped was switched on, and the "create agent" form defaults the toggle on for new agents. You can turn it off per agent at any time.

When the agent defers

On every turn, retrieval runs first and keeps only the chunks that clear the agent's confidence threshold. Strict mode returns the fallback message when, and only when, both of these are true:

  1. No retrieved chunk cleared the threshold (zero grounded sources), and
  2. There's no live page snapshot for the visitor's current page.

The second condition matters: if the widget sent a snapshot of the page the visitor is on, that counts as grounding and the agent answers from it normally. Curated answers, workflows, and the "talk to a human" shortcut all run before strict mode, so none of them are blocked by it.

A sparse knowledge base will defer often
Strict mode is only as good as what you've indexed. If the agent defers on questions it should be able to answer, add the missing pages as knowledge sources or pin a curated answer — don't lower the threshold to paper over a gap.

The fallback message

You can set a custom fallback per agent in the settings field. When it's left blank, the agent resolves a default in this order:

  1. The agent's own strict_fallback_message, if set.
  2. A built-in default in the agent's default language (e.g. Dutch for a nl agent).
  3. The global English default: "I can't confirm that based on the available information. Please contact the company for more information."

Keep it warm and forward-looking — point the visitor at a contact route (email, phone, or the "talk to a human" button) so a deferral still moves the conversation forward.

Deferrals feed the self-improvement loop

Every strict-mode deferral is recorded as a content gap — the visitor's exact question, clustered and counted. The most frequently deferred questions rise to the top of the gaps list, so strict mode doubles as a backlog of the knowledge your agent is missing. Answer a gap once and that question stops deferring.