Overview
Knowledge Sources give Cora access to your company's documentation, help center articles, internal playbooks, and other reference material. When a user asks Cora a question, it searches these sources and uses the most relevant content to provide accurate, grounded answers — in both chat conversations and agent workflows.
You can add sources at two levels:
Tenant-level — applies across all customer organizations (e.g., your product docs)
Customer organization — specific to a single customer (e.g., a customer-specific onboarding guide)
Supported Source Types
Website — paste a URL and Cora automatically crawls the site, indexing up to 200 pages. Great for public docs sites and help centers.
PDF — paste a link to a hosted PDF. Cora fetches and indexes the full document.
Google Drive — pick files directly from Google Drive using the built-in file picker. Supports Google Docs, Sheets, Slides, PDFs, Word documents, and plain text files. Requires the Google Drive integration to be connected first (Settings > Integrations).
Zendesk Help Center — one-click import of all published articles from your Zendesk Help Center. Requires the Zendesk integration to be connected first (Settings > Integrations).
Adding a Knowledge Source
Go to Settings > Knowledge Sources (for tenant-wide sources) or open a customer organization and click the Knowledge Sources tab
Click Add Knowledge Source
Select a source type (Website, PDF, Google Drive, or Zendesk)
Configure the source:
Website — paste the starting URL
PDF — paste the PDF link
Google Drive — select files from the picker
Zendesk — no additional configuration needed
Set Visibility — choose whether the source is Customer-facing or Internal only
Toggle Citations on or off — controls whether Cora can include links from this source in its responses
Click Add Source
Cora begins processing the source immediately. Depending on the size of the content, this may take a few minutes. You'll see a Processing indicator while it's working, which changes to Processed when complete.
Tenant vs Customer Organization Sources
Sources added at the tenant level (via Settings > Knowledge Sources) are available across all customer organizations. This is the right place for your product documentation, general FAQs, and company-wide resources.
Sources added to a specific customer organization (via that org's Knowledge Sources tab) are only used when Cora is working in the context of that customer. Use this for customer-specific materials like onboarding guides, custom playbooks, or account-specific documentation.
Both levels work together — when Cora answers a question for a customer organization, it searches both tenant-wide and org-specific sources.
Managing Sources
Each knowledge source appears as a card in the list, showing its type, status, and metadata.
Available actions:
Toggle Citations — turn citation links on or off at any time without re-processing the source
Refresh — re-crawl or re-sync the source to pick up content changes. Knowledge sources do not auto-refresh, so use this after updating your docs or help center.
Delete — permanently remove the source and all of its indexed content. This cannot be undone.
Note: The source URL and type cannot be changed after creation. To point to a different URL, delete the source and add a new one.
Visibility and Citations
Each source has two independent controls that determine how Cora uses it:
Visibility
Customer-facing — Cora uses this source when responding in any context, including customer-facing channels
Internal only — Cora only uses this source when responding in internal channels. Content from internal sources is never surfaced to customers.
Citations
When enabled, Cora may include links to specific pages or articles from the source in its responses
When disabled, Cora still uses the content for context but will not link to it
These settings can be combined independently — for example, you might have a customer-facing source with citations disabled if you want Cora to use the content but not share the links.
Tips
Start with your docs site or help center — adding your main documentation as a website source gives Cora a strong foundation for answering product questions
Use Google Drive for internal resources — playbooks, enablement docs, and internal wikis work well as Drive sources
Refresh after major content updates — since sources don't auto-sync, click Refresh when you've published significant changes to your documentation
Processing time varies — a single PDF processes in seconds; a large docs site with hundreds of pages may take a few minutes
Use visibility to control access — keep competitive intel and internal pricing docs as Internal only, and product documentation as Customer-facing