What is a knowledge gap?
A knowledge gap is a question your assistant cannot answer from the documents you trust. The honest result is unknown, plus a note so you can write the missing page. It is not a hallucination. A hallucination fills the gap with a fiction.
In plain English
Customers ask about a tune-up you do and the page never mentions it. The bot should say it will ask the shop, not invent a price. You collect those questions. That list is the next SOP, not a reason to fine-tune. A gap is an honest hole. The assistant should say the price is not in the file, then stop. Train the team to treat that sentence as a to-do: add the price or answer the customer yourself. If you punish the gap by demanding the model always answer, you will get inventions. Log the gaps for a week. They are your next SOP edits. A weekly gap list is a content plan. The questions the assistant could not answer are the pages you still owe the team. Fill the page, then ask the question again. Tape the unanswered question to the whiteboard until a retest passes, then erase it. Thumbtack a sticky labeled UNKNOWN on the corkboard until that retest feels dull.
How an owner would use it
Review unknown answers every week. Write the page or decide the question should always go to a person. Do not 'fix' a gap by letting the model guess.
Common mistakes
Treating every gap as a model failure sends you shopping for a bigger model. The page was missing. Treating a guess as a temporary answer teaches customers the wrong policy. Do not delete the unknown log. It is the editorial calendar.
A worked example
A bike shop
E-bike warranty questions become a page
This is an illustration, not a customer result. The site bot is told to say it does not know when the repair notes are silent. Three people ask about a battery warranty. The owner writes five lines from the manufacturer's current sheet and adds them to the knowledge base. The bot stops improvising.
Related terms
Prompts and guides
Questions owners ask
What is a knowledge gap?
It is a real question your trusted documents do not answer. The right behavior is to admit that and capture the question.
How do I close knowledge gaps?
Read the unknown list, write the missing fact from a source you trust, and put it in the knowledge base. Then ask the question again.
Is a knowledge gap the same as a hallucination?
No. A gap is silence in your files. A hallucination is the model talking anyway. You want the gap to stay visible.
Product guides are on AI apps for business.