I’m working with Vertex AI Agent Builder and running into a frustrating problem with my FAQ datastore. I have three datastores set up in my agent - one for website content and two others. The website datastore works perfectly and returns accurate search results when I test queries.
The issue is with my FAQ datastore. Even when I type the exact same question that exists in my FAQ documents, the search comes back empty or with no relevant snippets. This is really confusing because the questions are definitely there in the datastore.
I’ve already tried several troubleshooting steps like disconnecting and reconnecting the FAQ datastore, deleting all FAQ content and uploading it again, but nothing seems to fix it. Weirdly enough, some FAQ items do show up in searches but most of them don’t.
Has anyone else experienced this kind of inconsistent behavior with FAQ datastores in Agent Builder? I’m not sure how to debug this further or what might be causing only some documents to be searchable while others are completely ignored.
This happens because Agent Builder’s semantic search handles FAQ content differently than website content. The system struggles with FAQ docs since it expects more context around Q&A pairs, not just bare questions and answers. I’ve seen huge improvements after adding descriptive text around each FAQ entry. Also check your chunk size settings for the FAQ datastore - if chunks are too small, complete Q&A pairs get split up and lose their connection. Since your website datastore works fine, this is definitely an FAQ processing issue. Worth checking for duplicate or similar entries too, since the system can suppress similar content during retrieval.
for sure man, i had similar issues. make sure to look over the formatting of your docs, even small stuff can mess with indexing. and hey, if your FAQ answers are super short, that might cause them to be skipped too, just a thought!
Had this exact issue a few months ago and wasted way too much time on it. Check your document status in the datastore console first - my FAQ files showed ‘processing’ or ‘failed’ even though they looked uploaded fine. The indexing gets really picky with FAQ docs, especially if there’s special characters or messy formatting between Q&As. Also found out Agent Builder works way better with structured FAQ formats than just plain text. If you’re using a simple text file, convert it to JSON or make sure every question-answer pair follows the same pattern. The inconsistent behavior is pretty common unfortunately. Sometimes you just gotta wait 24-48 hours after upload since FAQ indexing takes forever.
Yeah, this drove me nuts too. Check if your FAQ datastore has the content type set right - mine defaulted to ‘unstructured’ when it should’ve been ‘structured’. Also, Vertex AI sometimes completely ignores short FAQ entries, so add extra context if they’re too brief.
I’ve been through this exact nightmare - spent weeks pulling my hair out over it. The problem’s usually in your FAQ datastore metadata config.
Hit up your datastore settings and check the schema mapping. FAQ datastores need you to explicitly map question and answer fields, but the auto-detection is garbage most of the time. You’ll need to manually map your question field to ‘title’ or ‘question’ and answers to ‘content’ or ‘answer’.
Double-check that your FAQ docs all follow the same structure. Found this out the hard way when half my FAQs worked perfectly and half were completely broken. The good ones had consistent formatting while the busted ones had weird spacing and random delimiters.
Here’s another gotcha - any empty entries or whitespace-only lines in your FAQ file will screw you over. Agent Builder indexes them as real documents but they tank the search relevance for everything around them.
If your schema mapping looks right, upload just 2-3 FAQ pairs as a test. That’ll tell you whether it’s a config issue or your data’s messed up.