Connecting your own pages
Your university already publishes the answers. Counselling has a page. Fees has a page. IT support has a page with the four things to try before you call them. The problem has never been that nobody wrote it down, it is that a first-year cannot find it.
Sources let you point the console's writing assistant at those pages. It reads what they say, and drafts Ask Anything answers from that rather than from what a university page usually says.
They live under Student resources → Ask Anything, below the answers, in the console. They sit on that screen rather than on one of their own because they are where those answers come from.
What happens, in order
- You name a page
A name in your words ("Counselling and mental health") and the exact address. One page per entry. Link to the page with the detail on it, not the landing page that only links elsewhere: a page of links gives the assistant almost nothing to work with.
- You press Read
We fetch that one page, pull the readable text out of it, and keep the text. The row then shows when we read it, how much text came back, and how many links were on the page. If we could not reach it, the row says so and why.
- You ask the assistant for an answer
It reads your connected pages first, then drafts. Ask it for "an answer about booking a counselling appointment" and you get one built from your own wording, your own hours, your own booking link.
- You publish it, or you do not
The draft lands in the library like every other draft. Nothing a source produces reaches a student until a person publishes it.
What we do not do
This is the part worth reading twice, because it is what most people assume the opposite of.
- We read the page you named, and nothing else on the site. No crawling, no following links, no sitemap, no "while we were there". Twelve pages means twelve entries you can see and delete.
- We read it when you press Read. There is no schedule and no background job. A page you connected in March holds March's text until somebody presses the button again.
- We only read pages over https, and we refuse an address that resolves to an internal network. A staff intranet page that is not reachable from the public internet cannot be connected this way.
- We never send a student anything a source produced. Every drafted answer is a draft.
If a service rewrites its page, our copy does not change until somebody presses Read. That is deliberate: an answer your team approved should not silently start saying something else. It does mean a page worth trusting is a page worth re-reading now and then. When you do, we tell you whether it changed.
Links in a drafted answer
An Ask Anything answer can carry a button. When the assistant drafts from a source, it may only use a link that appeared on that source's pages.
That rule exists because of the one AI failure that survives a skim. An answer that says "book through the Wellbeing Hub" with a plausible-looking address is worse than an answer with no link at all: it reads as correct, and it wastes the afternoon of the student who follows it. So a link the assistant did not see on your page is refused, and it is told to leave the link out and say so instead.
If the link you want is genuinely missing, add it yourself when you review the draft. You are not restricted; the assistant is.
What to connect first
The three that account for most of what students ask:
- Counselling and wellbeing. How to book, what it costs, what happens after hours.
- Fees, census and refunds. The dates page, not the policy PDF.
- IT support. Password resets, wifi, the student email setup.
Then whatever your inbox says. If four students asked about parking last week, your parking page is the fourth source.
Pausing and deleting
Pause keeps a page in the list but takes it out of what the assistant reads. Use it while a service is rewriting their page.
Delete removes it entirely. Answers already drafted from it stay exactly as they are and keep a record of the address they came from, so you can still see where a published answer originated. What is lost is the ability to re-read the page.
Who can do this
Anyone with the author content permission, which is the same permission as writing an Ask Anything answer by hand. Connecting a page changes what students eventually read, so it is authoring rather than a setting.
Where the text goes
The text of a connected page is passed to Anthropic's Claude API at the moment a staff member asks for a draft, in the same way your prompt and your existing content already are. It is your own published material, it is fetched from your own public website, and no student data is involved at any point. Our subprocessor register describes the flow in full.
The fastest answer is usually one question away.