Tutorial: Build a Knowledge Bot for Confluence

In this tutorial, you’ll build an internal knowledge bot that your team can use to find information in your Confluence wiki instantly. Instead of searching through pages and spaces, your team just asks a question.

Scenario: Your company uses Confluence for internal documentation — engineering runbooks, product specs, HR policies, onboarding guides. Finding the right page takes time. You want a chatbot that knows everything in the wiki.

Time needed: About 25 minutes (Confluence crawls are slower due to its dynamic content).

What you’ll learn:

How to crawl Confluence (a JavaScript-heavy site that many chatbot tools can’t handle)
How to supplement Confluence with PDF manuals
How to set up a private bot for internal use
How to connect via MCP so AI coding tools can search your wiki

Step 1: Add Confluence as a source

Confluence is a single-page application (SPA) — it loads content via JavaScript after the page shell renders. This means basic crawlers get empty pages. ChatbotIQ handles this, but you need to use the right settings.

Go to Knowledge Base → ”+ Add Source” → Website.
Enter your Confluence URL (e.g., https://yourcompany.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/DOCS).

Configure crawling for Confluence

Set these settings before starting the crawl:

Setting	Value	Why
Mode	Advanced	Confluence sitemaps are often incomplete. Link-following is more reliable.
Reader Mode	ON	Strips Confluence’s heavy UI chrome (sidebar, breadcrumbs, comments).
Content Selector	`#main-content`	Targets the article content area specifically.
Content Load Delay	3 seconds	Confluence loads content via async API calls. Needs time to render.
Concurrency	2—3	Confluence aggressively rate-limits. Higher concurrency triggers 429 errors.
Max Depth	15—20	Confluence wikis can be deeply nested.
Max Pages	Start with 200	Test first, then increase.

Click Discover and Crawl.

Expect slower crawling. At 2—3 concurrency, Confluence crawls at roughly 2—5 pages per minute. A 500-page wiki takes about 2—3 hours. This is normal — the low concurrency prevents Confluence from blocking you.

Step 2: Add PDF supplements (optional)

If your team has documents outside Confluence (runbooks, policy docs), add them as PDF sources. See Add PDFs and Q&A Sources for the walkthrough.

Step 3: Create the internal bot

Go to Bots → “Create Bot”.
Name: “Wiki Assistant” or “Team Knowledge Bot”.
Sources: Select your Confluence source and any PDF sources.
Model: GPT-5 Mini works well for internal Q&A. If your documentation is technical and nuanced, consider GPT-5.2 or Claude Sonnet 4.6 for better reasoning.
Personality: Here’s a template for internal bots:

You are a knowledgeable assistant for the [Company] team. You help team members find information from our internal wiki and documentation.

Guidelines:
- Be concise and direct -- team members want quick answers
- Always cite the source page so people can read the full context
- If the information might be outdated, mention when the source was last updated
- For sensitive topics (HR, legal, finance), remind the user to verify with the relevant team

Click Create.

Step 4: Configure for internal use

Open bot settings:

Privacy: Keep it private

Set Privacy Mode to Private. This means only workspace members can use the bot. No embed code needed — your team accesses it through the ChatbotIQ dashboard.

Alternatively, set it to Authenticated if you want any logged-in ChatbotIQ user to access it, or Public with Allowed Domains set to your intranet domain.

Source citations: Essential for trust

Keep Include Source Citations ON. Team members need to verify information and read the full Confluence page for context.

General knowledge: Consider enabling

Toggle Allow General Knowledge to ON if you want the bot to supplement wiki answers with general explanations. For example, if someone asks “What is Kubernetes?” and your wiki assumes prior knowledge, general knowledge mode can provide background context.

Step 5: Connect via MCP (for developers)

If your team uses AI coding assistants (Claude Desktop, Cursor, etc.), you can connect them to your knowledge bot via MCP:

In the Playground, switch to the MCP tab.
Toggle MCP Enabled to ON.
Generate an MCP API key.
Copy the connection configuration.
Add it to your AI tool’s MCP settings. For Claude Desktop, add it to claude_desktop_config.json.

Now your development team can ask their coding assistant questions about your internal docs without leaving their IDE.

Step 6: Test with real questions

Test with questions your team actually asks:

“How do I set up the development environment?”
“What’s the process for requesting time off?”
“Where is the architecture diagram for the billing service?”
“What are the runbook steps for a database failover?”

Check the Debug panel for each answer:

Are the right Confluence pages being retrieved?
Are the relevance scores high?
Is the content clean (no navigation or sidebar text)?

If content looks noisy: Adjust the Content Selector. Try article or .wiki-content instead of #main-content if your Confluence theme uses different markup.

Step 7: Roll out to your team

Invite team members — go to Team and invite your colleagues. Give them Member or Viewer roles.
Share the link — send your team the ChatbotIQ dashboard URL.
Set expectations — let your team know what the bot can and can’t do. It’s great for finding information, but it’s only as good as the content in your wiki.

Keep it current

Confluence content changes frequently. Refresh your source weekly, and after major wiki updates. See Keep Content Up to Date for refresh strategies.

Configure Crawling for Your Site — all crawling recipes
Connect via MCP — detailed MCP setup guide
Keep Content Up to Date — refresh strategies