docs · troubleshooting
Answers are being blocked
troubleshooting
Diagnose why an assistant refuses or escalates more than expected.
When an assistant refuses, deflects, or escalates more often than you expect, the cause is almost always one of a few specific gates rather than a general failure. Work through them in order — the cheapest to rule out first.
Most common causes
Empty or stale corpus
If the assistant's knowledge base has no documents in the ready state, every query escalates by design — there is nothing to ground an answer in.
Scope Gate deflection
The Scope Gate classifies a query as out of scope and deflects it before retrieval. If in-scope questions are being deflected, loosen the deflect categories under Settings ▸ Scope Gate.
Fallback refusal
When the best retrieval score falls below the Minimum retrieval score, the Fallback policy returns a no-answer or human handoff instead of answering. Lower the threshold or improve the corpus.
Guardrails
An input or output guardrail (PII, injection, toxicity, or hallucination) tripped and blocked the response. Review which filters are enabled under Settings ▸ Guardrails.
Check the corpus first — An empty or not-ready corpus escalates everything by design. Rule it out before you start tuning thresholds — otherwise you will chase a gate that was never the problem.
How to narrow it down
- Confirm the corpus has documents and that their status is ready, not still processing.
- Open Settings ▸ Scope Gate and check whether the deflect categories are catching legitimate questions.
- Open Settings ▸ Fallback and compare the Minimum retrieval score against the scores you see on real queries.
- Open Settings ▸ Guardrails and see which input and output filters are active.
featureGuardrails (tenant)Input and output safety filters applied to every assistant in the workspace.
featureFallback policyWhat the assistant does when no approved source supports an answer.
featureScope Gate0.0–1.0; reserved knob — sets the classifier confidence floor.
featureDocumentsUpload, crawl, and manage the approved source material.
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