Answer quality is almost always a knowledge problem, not a model problem. Here's what to work through, in the order that pays off fastest.
1. Check embedding coverage first
Look at AI search coverage on your readiness score. Content without embeddings can only be found by exact keyword match, so a visitor who phrases things differently from your article title won't find it at all.
This is the single most common cause of "the answer is right there and it didn't find it". See Content isn't searchable.
2. Work your knowledge gaps
Your knowledge gaps list is real customers telling you what's missing, ranked by how often they asked. Start at the top.
3. Split articles that cover too much
Retrieval returns whole articles. A single "Account FAQ" covering billing, passwords, exports, and deletion gets retrieved for all four and dilutes every one of them.
One topic per article. Four focused articles beat one comprehensive one.
4. Title articles as questions
Titles carry extra weight in search. "Why is my payment failing?" matches how people ask far better than "Payment troubleshooting reference".
5. Use your customers' words
Your internal vocabulary and your customers' vocabulary diverge over time. If they say "invoice" and you say "billing statement", include both. If they say "it crashed" and you say "unhandled exception", write the sentence that contains both.
The knowledge gaps list shows the actual phrasings people used — mine it.
6. Prune before you add
Unpublish content that's outdated, contradictory, or irrelevant. Two articles giving different answers to the same question is worse than one article, because the agent may cite either.
Marketing pages picked up by the site scan are common culprits: they're optimistic by design and make poor support answers. Unpublish the ones that aren't helping.
7. Give the agent context about your product
Under sales readiness, make sure your pricing, company story, and feature coverage are actually in the knowledge base. An agent that can't cite your pricing can't answer pricing questions.
8. Use page rules
Page rules let you pin the right articles and the right mode to the pages where you already know what visitors need. This is often faster than improving retrieval globally.
What not to bother with
Rewriting articles to "sound more AI-friendly" is wasted effort. Clear writing for humans is clear writing for retrieval. The things that actually matter are coverage, focus, and vocabulary.