---
title: "Assist Content Ingestion"
description: "How Edge Assist ingests your content: the index file format, chunking guidance, the hourly refresh cycle, and ingestion limits."
url: https://edge.network/docs/assist/ingestion/
---

# Assist Content Ingestion

Assist

# Content Ingestion

Assist answers only from content you give it. You publish a JSON index of your content at
a URL; Assist polls it hourly and re-indexes whenever it changes. Your build pipeline is
the source of truth.

## The Index File

A single JSON document, deliberately small — most site generators can emit it in a few
dozen lines of build script:

```
{
  "hash": "3f9c2a71b4e8d05c",
  "chunks": [
    {
      "url": "/pricing",
      "title": "Pricing",
      "section": "pricing",
      "text": "Storage is billed at $0.015 per GB per month. There are no egress fees within…"
    },
    {
      "url": "/docs/storage/buckets",
      "title": "Buckets",
      "section": "docs",
      "text": "A bucket is a flat namespace for objects. Names must be globally unique and…"
    }
  ]
}
```

| Field | Notes |
| `hash` | Required | Any string that changes when the content changes (a content hash is ideal). Assist re-fetches the index hourly but only re-indexes when the hash differs — and a changed hash also invalidates the answer cache. |
| `chunks[].url` | Required | The page the text came from, as a relative path (e.g. /pricing). Used for citations and search results. |
| `chunks[].title` | Recommended | The page title, shown in search results and citation chips. |
| `chunks[].section` | Optional | A coarse grouping label (e.g. docs, pricing, blog). Shown in search results. |
| `chunks[].text` | Required | The chunk content: plain text, no HTML. |

## Chunking Guidance

A chunk is the unit of retrieval: when a visitor asks a question, Assist pulls the
best-matching chunks into the answer. Good chunking is most of the quality:

- **Aim for ~1,400 characters per chunk**, split on sentence or paragraph boundaries. A chunk should read as a coherent passage on its own.
- **Skip boilerplate.** Navigation, footers, and cookie banners add noise, not answers. Very short fragments (under ~80 characters) aren't worth indexing.
- **Keep facts with their subject.** If a price or limit lives in a table, render it into the chunk as a sentence ("The free tier includes 250 questions per month") so retrieval can find it.
- **One page, many chunks.** Repeat the same `url`/`title` across a long page's chunks — citations group by page automatically.

## The Refresh Cycle

- Assist fetches your index URL **hourly**.
- If the `hash` matches the last ingest, nothing happens.
- If it changed, the site's search index is rebuilt from the new chunks and the [answer cache](https://edge.network/docs/assist/caching) is cleared — stale answers can't outlive the content they came from.

Deployed something and don't want to wait? **Assist → Ingestion → Re-ingest now**
forces a fetch immediately. The same page shows the index status: page and chunk counts,
last refresh time, and the last ingest error if a fetch or parse failed.

Ingestion failures never take the assistant down — it keeps answering from the last
good index until a fetch succeeds again.

## Ingestion Limits

| Limit | Free | Paid |
| Pages (distinct URLs) per site | 500 | 10,000 |
| Chunks per site | 50,000 |

Knowledge bases beyond 10,000 documents are handled by
[Expert Services](https://edge.network/solutions/expert-services).

## Other Ingestion Sources

The index URL is the most direct path today. Two more sources are on the way:
**Storage bucket** ingestion (point Assist at an Edge Storage bucket of
markdown, text, HTML, or PDF documents) and **crawl-based** ingestion (give
Assist your site URL and it follows your sitemap itself — no build step). Both feed the
same index and behave identically downstream.

## Next Steps

[Answer Caching — what happens to answers when content changes](https://edge.network/docs/assist/caching) [API Reference — search and ask over the ingested content](https://edge.network/docs/assist/api)
[Back to Docs](https://edge.network/docs) [Need help?](https://edge.network/support)