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The Knowledge Base is where you tell Athena the verified facts about your business - your pricing, products, policies, positioning - so that everything Athena writes about you stays consistent and accurate. Once it’s set up, Athena draws from the Knowledge Base whenever it researches, generates, optimizes, or fact-checks your content. Note: The Knowledge Base is included in some plans and not others. If your plan doesn’t include it, you’ll see a Feature locked screen when you try to open it. Reach out to your Athena account team if you’d like access.

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What the Knowledge Base does

Think of the Knowledge Base as the source of truth Athena consults whenever it needs to know something specific about your business. It does three things:
  • Stores verified facts. Statements like “Our Pro plan starts at $99/month” live in the Knowledge Base as source-backed entries, grouped under pillars.
  • Tracks your internal pages. It maintains a list of pages on your own domain so Athena knows what content of yours already exists and can recommend internal links when writing or optimizing content.
  • Measures content coverage. It shows you how well your existing content already covers each pillar, so you can see where to invest in new articles.
Every fact in the Knowledge Base traces back to a source - Athena doesn’t make things up. It only uses claims that you’ve added directly or that came out of a source you provided.

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How it’s organized

There are two things in the Knowledge Base:
  • Pillars - subject areas your brand wants to be the authority on (for example, Pricing, Integrations, Onboarding, a specific product category, or your Return policy). Each pillar groups together the related facts Athena has learned. You can create pillars yourself, or let Athena discover them automatically.
  • Internal links - pages on your own domain that Athena should know about when generating or optimizing content. Adding more of your own pages here means Athena has more places to link to internally.
Each pillar has its own detail view where you can see the claims attached to it, the internal pages associated with it, and a synthesized summary document Athena builds from those claims.

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Finding the Knowledge Base

The Knowledge Base is its own left-sidebar item - click Knowledge Base in the sidebar to open it. Inside, you’ll see two tabs:
  • Pillars - every pillar Athena knows about for your site, with a Content coverage bar showing how well your existing content covers each one.
  • Internal links - every page on your own domain that’s been added to the Knowledge Base.
In the top right of the page you’ll find two controls:
  • Verify facts - runs a validation analysis (see Verifying facts against the outside world below).
  • Add knowledge - the entry point for adding new pillars, new claims, or new internal links.

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Setting it up

The fastest way to bootstrap a Knowledge Base from nothing is to let Athena do the initial research for you.
  1. Open Knowledge Base from the sidebar.
  2. Click Add knowledge > Discover pillars.
  3. Confirm the research run.
Athena will analyze your site, propose a set of pillars relevant to your business, research each one, and start populating it with claims. This runs in the background; pillars appear in your Pillars tab as they’re discovered, and claims continue to populate over the following minutes. That’s the only step required to get started - once pillars begin appearing, the Knowledge Base is live and Athena will start drawing from it.

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Adding more knowledge over time

Everything you can add lives under the Add knowledge dropdown, organized into two groups: Pillars
  • Create pillar - define a new subject area Athena didn’t auto-discover. Give it a name and a short description.
  • Discover pillars - let Athena auto-discover pillars relevant to your site (the same flow used during initial setup).
Knowledge
  • Add URLs - paste URLs or crawl a domain. Athena adds the pages to your internal link bank and also extracts claims from them.
  • Upload document - extract claims from a PDF, DOCX, or pasted text.
  • Extract from Content Hub - pull claims from articles you’ve already published.
You can also add claims directly to a specific pillar by opening that pillar and using the Add knowledge options inside its detail view - anything you ingest from inside a pillar is automatically attached to it.

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Verifying facts against the outside world

The Verify facts button at the top of the Knowledge Base kicks off a validation analysis. Athena takes your pillars and checks them against the AI responses that Oracle has already collected and lists the third-party sources that contradict them. This is useful as a periodic sanity check - for example, when a policy or pricing detail changes and you want to confirm that what’s in your Knowledge Base still matches what’s actually out there. Results land in the Oracle area of the app, where you can step through any discrepancies and decide what to update.

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How Athena uses the Knowledge Base

Once your Knowledge Base has some content in it, it shows up across the rest of Athena:
  • When Athena optimizes a piece of content. The optimize view tells you exactly which pillars, claims, and internal links Athena pulled from while suggesting edits - each suggestion can show the supporting claim and its confidence.
  • When Athena drafts or edits content. AI-attributed claims in the article body appear as highlights - clicking one shows the source and the pillar it came from in the right sidebar.
  • In suggestion citations. Each AI suggestion that depends on a claim shows the claim, its pillar, and a link to the source.
  • In Oracle. Oracle compares what AI search engines say about your brand against your Knowledge Base and flags discrepancies - your Knowledge Base is the source of truth it’s checking against.
  • In Athena Agent columns in the Content Hub. When you set up an Athena Agent column, you can toggle on the Fact Bank option to make the column pull from the Knowledge Base.
The short version: anywhere Athena needs to make a factual claim about your business, it reaches into the Knowledge Base first.

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Content coverage

Each pillar in the Pillars tab has a Content coverage bar. It shows what percentage of that pillar’s facts are reflected in articles you’ve already published. A higher bar means you have content covering most of what Athena knows about that pillar; a lower bar (or a dash) means you’ve got facts in your Knowledge Base that no published article currently covers - usually a content gap worth filling. Coverage updates as Athena indexes new content. It’s a guide for spotting where to invest in writing next.

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Frequently asked questions

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Do I have to set up the Knowledge Base manually?

No. The fastest path is Add knowledge > Discover pillars, which has Athena research your site and propose pillars, claims, and supporting evidence on its own. You can refine and add to it from there.

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Where does the Knowledge Base get its facts from?

Athena extracts facts from a few different places: web research it runs on your site, documents or URLs you upload, articles already in your Content Hub, and AI search responses that mention your brand. Every claim records its source so you can see where it came from.

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What’s the difference between an internal link in the Knowledge Base and an article in the Content Hub?

The Content Hub is where you track and measure the performance of pages you care about (your blog posts, key landing pages, etc.). The Knowledge Base’s internal links are a broader set of pages on your own domain that Athena should be aware of when writing or optimizing content - they don’t have to also be in the Content Hub.

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Why does my content coverage show a dash (-)?

A dash means there’s no coverage data yet for that pillar - usually because the pillar doesn’t have any claims yet, you don’t have matching Content Hub articles, or coverage analysis hasn’t run yet. It’ll fill in as Athena indexes more content.

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How do I delete a pillar?

Open the Pillars tab, select the pillar with the checkbox, and use the action bar that appears at the bottom of the page to delete it. Deleting a pillar also deletes the claims attached to it.

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What does “Verify facts” do?

It runs a validation analysis that checks your pillars against external web sources (and against each other, for internal consistency). Athena surfaces any contradictions it finds in the Oracle area of the app, where you can review and decide what to update.

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How does the Knowledge Base interact with Oracle?

Oracle uses the Knowledge Base as the ground truth for fact-checking. When Oracle scans AI search responses for discrepancies, it’s comparing them against what you’ve told Athena is true via the Knowledge Base. The richer your Knowledge Base, the more Oracle has to work with.

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My plan doesn’t include the Knowledge Base - what can I still do?

You’ll see a Feature locked screen when you open the Knowledge Base, and a few related features (like the Fact Bank toggle on Athena Agent columns) will be hidden. The rest of Athena continues to work normally. Reach out to your Athena account team if you’d like to add the Knowledge Base to your plan.
If you have a question that isn’t covered here, reach out to your Athena account team or contact support - we’re happy to walk through Knowledge Base setup or any specific workflow live.