Suggested questions

Enable and display suggested questions in your Ask AI experience.

Suggested questions help guide users toward common or helpful queries and improve overall engagement. They appear in your Ask AI interface as clickable prompts that users can select to get started quickly.

Getting started

There are two ways to set up suggested questions, depending on whether you’re creating a new assistant or working with an existing one.

Option 1: During assistant creation

When creating a new Ask AI assistant, the last (optional) step allows you to add suggested questions directly in the setup flow. This is the quickest way to add initial suggestions before launching your assistant.

You can add up to three questions that will be active immediately once your assistant is created.

Option 2: From the assistant analytics view

For existing assistants, you can manage suggested questions from the Analytics view. This approach is data-driven, allowing you to select questions based on actual user behavior and performance metrics.

1. Open your assistant’s Analytics page and locate the Active Suggestions section.

2. Click Edit Questions to open the Suggested Questions Manager.

3. From there, you can drag and drop questions from a pool of user-submitted queries. Each question shows the number of interactions and any thumbs up or thumbs down feedback.
4. Move up to three questions into the Active Suggested Questions section by Publishing or Unpublishing questions - these will appear in your front-end UI.

Index creation

When you add suggested questions, an index named algolia_ask_ai_suggested_questions is automatically created in your Algolia application. This index is used to retrieve and display suggested questions within your application.

Each suggested question is stored along with its corresponding assistant ID. On the front end, these records are automatically filtered using facet filters, ensuring that each assistant only displays its own set of suggested questions.

We recommend not modifying the index configuration or records manually. The index is automatically managed by Ask AI to ensure suggested questions work correctly.

Enabling suggested questions

This feature is available in DocSearch v4.3 and later. Support for SiteSearch is coming soon.

To enable the suggested questions feature in your application, update your Ask AI initialization configuration. This connects your frontend to the algolia_ask_ai_suggested_questions index.

Add the following property to your Ask AI configuration: suggestedQuestions: true

JavaScript

docsearch({
  // ...
  askAi: {
    assistantId: 'YOUR_ALGOLIA_ASSISTANT_ID',
    suggestedQuestions: true,
  },
});

Once enabled, your application will automatically retrieve and display suggested questions relevant to each assistant.

For more configuration options and examples, see the DocSearch API reference.

Display on the front end

Once the feature is enabled, suggested questions automatically appear in your Ask AI user interface. You can customize their placement, layout, and styling to align with your application’s design system and user experience.

Generating answers from clicks

When a site visitor clicks a suggested question, Ask AI automatically generates and displays a relevant response—just as it would for a manually entered query. This creates a seamless experience for your visitors, allowing them to discover answers quickly with a single click.