Issue with FAQ Document Retrieval
I’ve been working with Vertex AI Agent Builder and ran into a frustrating problem. My setup includes multiple datastores - one for website content and another for FAQ documents.
What’s working: The website datastore searches perfectly fine and returns relevant results when I test queries.
What’s broken: The FAQ datastore is basically useless right now. Even when I type in the exact same question that exists in my FAQ documents, the search returns nothing. It’s like the documents aren’t even there.
Troubleshooting attempts:
- Removed and added the FAQ datastore again
- Deleted all FAQ files and uploaded them fresh
- Still having the same issue
The weird part is that maybe 20% of my FAQ documents show up in searches, but the other 80% are completely invisible to the system. Has anyone else dealt with this kind of inconsistent behavior? I’m looking for any debugging tips or solutions that might help fix this.
I had the same issue with my Vertex AI setup. First, double-check that your FAQ docs are actually indexed - not just uploaded. Go to your datastore console and verify the indexing status. Documents can look fine but fail to index properly because of formatting problems. I fixed mine by switching from PDFs to plain text files, which stopped the parsing errors. Also, make sure your FAQ content isn’t too short - brief entries often get skipped during indexing, which might explain why you’re only seeing some of your FAQs in search results.
This sounds like a content structure issue I ran into last year. Your FAQ documents might be getting parsed weird during ingestion.
Check the actual content format of your working 20% versus the missing 80%. In my case, FAQs with certain characters or formatting were getting mangled during processing.
Here’s what worked for me:
Clean up your FAQ structure first. Remove special formatting, bullet points, or weird spacing. Just use plain question-answer pairs.
Split large FAQ files into smaller chunks. I had one massive FAQ document that was partially indexed because the system choked on the size. Breaking it into individual files fixed the visibility problem.
Check your document metadata. Sometimes the system ignores files if the metadata’s incomplete or has encoding issues.
Also worth testing with a single, simple FAQ file to see if new uploads work properly. If they do, you know it’s something about your existing content format. If not, you might have a datastore configuration problem that needs Google support.
I hit the same issue with FAQ datastores in Vertex AI. Turns out it was document chunking and semantic overlap between my website content and FAQ docs. When you’ve got multiple datastores, the system picks favorites based on confidence scores. Here’s what fixed it for me: bump up the retrieval count and lower the similarity threshold for your FAQ datastore. That exact match problem screams that semantic search is being too picky. Also double-check if your FAQ docs have enough context around each question. Standalone Q&A pairs without surrounding text get terrible relevance scores. I added brief intro sentences and category headers - made retrieval way better. The partial visibility you’re seeing probably means some documents are richer in context than others.
Document permissions are probably causing this selective visibility issue. I ran into the same thing when some FAQ files had different upload permissions or got processed under different service accounts. The system handled them inconsistently even though they looked identical in the console. Re-upload your missing FAQ docs using the exact same method and credentials as your working 20%. Also double-check that all documents have identical access settings in your datastore config. Another thing - check if your FAQ documents have tables or structured data that’s getting stripped during processing. I’ve seen question-answer pairs in table format just vanish from search results, but the same content in paragraph form worked perfectly. The processing pipeline gets picky about document structures even when they look fine to us.
yeah, that’s def an indexing lag. vertex ai can be super slow with new uploads - like, i’ve seen it take hours or even days for bigger files. check ur datastore activity logs to see if it’s still crunching. had to wait up to 48 hours before docs actually became searchable!