A chatbot gives inconsistent answers when two of its sources say different things. It answers from the passages closest to each question, so one phrasing surfaces your delivery page and another surfaces an old FAQ, and visitors get two different facts. The fix is an audit: list the facts customers ask about, find every place each one is stated, and make them agree.
Our guide on keeping your chatbot's knowledge up to date covers routine maintenance. This post is narrower: how to find contradictions that already exist, and how to stop new ones.
How a contradiction reaches a visitor
When a visitor asks a question, a SpideyChat bot searches everything it has learned and takes the five passages closest in meaning. Those passages can come from crawled pages, uploaded files, pasted text and Q&A pairs, all ranked together. The bot then answers using only what those passages say.
Say your delivery page states "Free delivery on orders over £50" and an older FAQ page says "We deliver free over £40". (A hypothetical, but a common pattern.) A visitor who asks "is delivery free?" may get the delivery page first. One who asks "what's the minimum for free shipping?" may get the FAQ. If both passages come back together, the reply might pick one, mention both, or hedge. None of those outcomes is good, and from the outside it looks like the bot is unreliable when it's actually reporting your content faithfully.
Where contradictions come from
Contradictions rarely start as mistakes. They build up:
- Copies. A page duplicated to make a new service page keeps the old figures in a section nobody edited.
- Separate authors. The FAQ was written by one person and the policy page by another, months apart.
- Expired promotions. The offer page is unlinked but still published, or still in the bot's knowledge.
- Documents older than the site. A brochure PDF uploaded at launch still states last year's terms.
- Q&A pairs written from memory. Someone typed "returns within 14 days" when the policy says 30.
- Blog posts, if you chose to include them. A post from 2023 explaining "our new pricing" is now old pricing.
The audit: build a fact inventory
Reading every page hoping to notice a conflict doesn't work, because the two versions are rarely on screen together. Work fact by fact instead.
Step 1: list the facts customers ask about. Start with prices and minimum charges, delivery thresholds and times, returns or cancellation windows, opening hours, service areas, lead times, guarantees and contact details. Then open Answer gaps and your recent conversations in the dashboard and add any fact that keeps coming up.
Step 2: find every place each fact is stated. Search your site's content for the topic and for the numbers. Then open your chatbot's page, go to Manage knowledge and click "Show sources". Crawled pages are listed by path, uploaded files by file name, pasted text by its label (or manual), and Q&A pairs added with "Add a Q&A" as manual-qa. Check the FAQ section further down the page as well.
Step 3: write it down. A simple table is enough:
| Fact | Value | Where it's stated |
|---|---|---|
| Free delivery threshold | £50 | /delivery |
| Free delivery threshold | £40 | /faq |
| Returns window | 30 days | /returns, brochure.pdf |
| Returns window | 14 days | manual-qa |
| Saturday hours | 9 to 1 | /contact |
Step 4: mark every fact with more than one value. Those are your contradictions. In the example, two of five facts disagree, and you found both without reading a single page end to end.
Probe the bot to confirm
For each contradiction, ask the chatbot the same fact three ways: a direct question, a casual one and one using a customer's wording ("do I pay for postage under fifty quid?"). If the answers differ, the conflict is live. Add each fact to your chatbot's Test suite with the correct value as the expected text. The tests fail now and should pass once you've fixed the sources.
Fix the source, not the symptom
Decide which value is true, then give each fact one home: the page that owns it, such as /delivery for delivery terms. Everywhere else either repeats that value exactly or links to the home page without restating it.
Then bring the bot in line:
- Edit the wrong page on your site, then re-crawl. Re-crawling replaces the entries for each page the crawler reads again.
- Delete sources for pages you removed. A page that's gone from your site isn't re-read, so its old entries stay until you delete that source under Manage knowledge.
- Delete the old file and upload the corrected one. Uploading a new version adds it next to the old one rather than replacing it.
- Edit Q&A pairs and FAQ entries in place.
Resist the quick fix of adding a Q&A pair that says "Free delivery is over £50". It doesn't override anything. Q&A pairs are ranked alongside page text, so now you have three passages on the subject, and one of them is still wrong. The same trap catches price corrections, which we cover in when your chatbot quotes the wrong price.
On the Free plan, where the crawler runs once as a 10-page setup, edit the affected entries under Manage knowledge directly after fixing the site.
When both values are true
Sometimes the "contradiction" is two correct facts with an unstated condition: different delivery prices for mainland and islands, different hours in summer, different prices for residential and commercial work. The fix is to name the condition in every place the value appears: "Mainland UK: free over £50. Highlands and islands: £9.95 flat."
With the condition written down, the bot has something to work with. SpideyChat bots are instructed that when a question could relate to several options in their knowledge, they should ask the visitor one short question about which applies before answering. That only works if your content says what the options are.
Keep new contradictions out
- One home per fact, written down somewhere the team can see.
- Change the home first, then search for copies of the old value.
- Re-run the Test suite after every content change.
- Repeat the inventory every few months, or whenever prices or policies change.
If you'd like to see how a chatbot answers from your site as it stands today, try SpideyChat with your website address. Ask it your top five facts in a few phrasings each, and any contradiction on your pages will show up in the answers within minutes.