I’m working with Google’s Agent Builder and running into a frustrating issue with my FAQ datastore. My setup includes three different datastores - one for website content and two others. The website datastore works perfectly and returns proper search results when I test queries.
The problem is with my FAQ datastore. Even when I search for the exact same questions that exist in my FAQ documents, the search returns completely empty results. This is really puzzling because some FAQ entries do get found occasionally, but most of them just don’t show up at all.
I’ve already tried several troubleshooting steps like disconnecting and reconnecting the datastore, deleting all FAQ content and uploading it again, but nothing seems to fix this inconsistent behavior. Has anyone experienced similar issues with Agent Builder FAQ datastores? I’m looking for any debugging tips or solutions to make the FAQ search more reliable.
I’ve hit this exact issue before. It’s usually how Agent Builder handles FAQ content differently from regular website stuff.
First - check if your FAQs use consistent Q&A formatting. Agent Builder needs clear patterns to tell questions from answers. I’ve seen paragraph-style or conversational FAQs get completely ignored.
Duplicate content detection is another killer. If your FAQ answers are too similar or have repetitive boilerplate text, the system filters them out. Had one project where every answer started with “Thank you for your question” - totally broke the indexing.
Here’s how to debug it: grab one FAQ that’s not showing up and make a test document with just that Q&A. Upload it as a separate datastore and see if it indexes. If it works, you’ve got content conflicts or formatting issues in your main file.
Also double-check your datastore settings. Make sure content type is set for FAQ format, not generic document indexing. The parsing rules are different - that’s probably why your website content works but FAQs don’t.
Had the exact same issue about six months back. It turned out my FAQ documents were formatted inconsistently, and Agent Builder’s search is super picky about structure. I standardized every FAQ entry with clear question headers and clean answer paragraphs. The real game-changer was splitting my massive FAQ file into smaller chunks - 10 to 15 Q&As max per document, organized by topic. My search accuracy jumped from 30% to 95% after that. The indexing just works way better with smaller documents. Also, check for any unusual characters or formatting that might be interfering with the indexing process.