When the First Search Fails, Let the AI Try Again

Here’s how almost all AI search works, whether it’s on your knowledge base or someone else’s. You ask a question. The system does one search, grabs whatever comes back, and writes an answer from that. If the first search happened to pull the right content, great. If it didn’t, you get a confident answer built on the wrong material, or an honest “I couldn’t find that.” Either way, it tried once and stopped.

That’s fine when your content is small and your questions are simple. It falls down exactly when you need it most: a big knowledge base, nuanced terminology, a question phrased differently to how the article was written. A person wouldn’t give up after one search. They’d rephrase and look again. So we let the AI do that too.

What Smart Search actually does

When Smart Search is on and the first search doesn’t surface a confident answer, the AI doesn’t just settle. It looks at what came back, decides it’s not good enough, refines the query, and searches again. Different angle, a synonym, a broader phrasing, a related concept. It keeps going until it’s found what it needs or it hits the limit you set.

That limit is the important part, and you control it. You choose how many extra searches the AI is allowed: one, two, or three. One extra pass is often enough to catch a rephrasing. Three is for large or fiddly content sets where the right article is genuinely hard to land on first go. You set it once, in your AI settings, and it applies everywhere your content answers questions: inside the app, in the widget on your site, and in your help centre.

It’s off by default. You turn it on deliberately, because, and this is the honest part, it isn’t free.

The trade-off, said plainly

Every extra search is more work for the AI, and more work costs more. More tokens, more credits. If you’ve brought your own AI provider, those extra searches land on your own bill, not ours. We are not going to pretend otherwise or bury it.

So Smart Search is a dial, not a magic switch. Turn it up and you get noticeably smarter answers on hard questions, and you pay a bit more per query to get them. Turn it down or off and you save the spend, and accept that the occasional awkwardly-phrased question won’t get answered as well. Neither is the right choice for everyone. That’s exactly why it’s a setting you control rather than something we decided for you and folded into a number you can’t see.

And because we think you should be able to watch the trade-off, not just trust it, the extra searches show up in your analytics. You can see when the AI ran again, so you can tell whether the extra spend is actually buying you better answers on your content, and dial it accordingly.

One caveat worth naming: Smart Search needs an AI provider that supports tool calls, because the whole thing works by letting the AI decide to run the search tool again. Most modern providers do. If yours doesn’t, Smart Search quietly falls back to a single search rather than breaking anything, and we tell you so in the settings.

Why this fits how we think

We are not in the business of making AI guess more cleverly. We’re in the business of making it find your verified content more reliably. Smart Search is squarely that. It doesn’t invent a better answer when the content isn’t there. It works harder to find the answer that is there, and if it genuinely isn’t, it still tells you so.

That’s the line we care about. Not “let the AI be creative”, but “let the AI be thorough, within a budget you set and can see”. A person who’s good at their job doesn’t stop at the first dead end. Now your knowledge base doesn’t have to either, as long as you’ve decided the extra effort is worth it.

Have a look in your AI settings. Turn it to one and ask it something you know is buried awkwardly in your content. Then decide for yourself whether two is worth it.

The KnowledgeScout Team