---
title: "Assist Answer Caching"
description: "How Edge Assist caches answers: repeat questions are served instantly from your site's cache, invalidated the moment your content changes."
url: https://edge.network/docs/assist/caching/
---

# Assist Answer Caching

Assist

# Answer Caching

Visitor questions follow a power law: a handful of questions make up most of the traffic.
Assist answers each one once, caches it per site, and replays it instantly for everyone
who asks after — with identical, consistent wording.

## What Gets Cached

- **First questions only.** The opening question of a conversation is cacheable; follow-ups depend on everything said before them and always go to the model.
- **Questions are normalised** before lookup — case and punctuation don't matter, so "How much is storage?" and "how much is Storage" share one cache entry.
- **Cached site-wide.** The same question asked on any page of your site hits the same entry. The one exception: questions that point at the visitor's current page ("is there a limit on this page?", "what does this product cost?") are answered against that page and cached per page.
- **Cache hits still stream.** The answer is replayed word by word — instantly available, but never a jarring wall of text.

## Invalidation

A cached answer is only served while everything it was built from is still true:

- **Content changes** — every cache entry is stamped with the content hash it was answered from. A re-ingest clears the site's cache entirely; the next asks rebuild it from the new content.
- **Assistant changes** — entries are also stamped with a version of the assistant's instructions, so improvements to how Assist answers roll out without stale replays. Your pinned facts are part of that version: edit a fact in **Assist → Overrides** and cached answers stop matching immediately.
- **Time** — a 7-day TTL backstop means nothing lives forever, even if your content never changes.

Need it gone now? **Assist → Ingestion → Purge answer cache** clears your
site's cache instantly and for free — for "I fixed the content upstream but haven't
re-deployed" or "that cached answer needs to go".

## Overrides Answer First

Curated Q&As (**Assist → Overrides**) are checked before the cache and before
any model call: a first-turn question that strongly matches one returns your exact words,
instantly. Pinned facts steer every model-composed answer and take precedence over page
content. Overrides are free on every site.

## Cached Answers & Billing

Cached answers count as answered questions — metering is per question asked, however
it's answered. The cache is a speed and consistency win for your visitors, not a
billing discount. Cache statistics (entries, hits, share of traffic) are on your
site's Overview page.

## Cache Pre-Warming

Rather than waiting for visitors to fill the cache, pre-warming reads your ingested
content, generates the questions visitors are likely to ask, and answers them into the
cache ahead of time — so your most-asked questions are instant from the very first
visitor, and the cache can re-fill itself automatically after every content change.
Pre-warming is a paid feature currently rolling out; each pre-warmed answer meters at
the normal per-question rate. See [pricing](https://edge.network/assist/pricing).

## Next Steps

[Content Ingestion — the refresh cycle that drives invalidation](https://edge.network/docs/assist/ingestion) [Limits & Billing — what a question costs](https://edge.network/docs/assist/limits-and-billing)
[Back to Docs](https://edge.network/docs) [Need help?](https://edge.network/support)