---
title: Knowledge Bases
description: Knowledge bases give your workflows searchable memory — large volumes of text an agent can search by meaning and use to ground its answers.
---

import { VideoPlaceholder } from '@/components/ui/video-placeholder'
import { WhatYouWillLearn } from '@/components/ui/what-you-will-learn'
import { VideoChapters } from '@/components/ui/video-chapters'
import { WorkflowPreview, SUPPORT_KB_WORKFLOW } from '@/components/workflow-preview'

<VideoPlaceholder eyebrow="Knowledge Bases" title="Knowledge Bases" src="https://nnjgp7vypgx4myuq.public.blob.vercel-storage.com/academy-preview/knowledge-bases-light-with-intro.mp4" className="mt-2" />

<div className="mt-8 grid grid-cols-1 items-start gap-10 lg:grid-cols-[1fr_300px]">
<div>

A **knowledge base** gives your workflows searchable memory. You put in large volumes of text, and an agent retrieves just the parts that matter — by meaning, not keywords.

<WhatYouWillLearn
  items={[
    {
      title: 'The context problem',
      body: 'You cannot stuff everything into a model\'s context. A knowledge base lets you search a large corpus and pass back only what is relevant.',
    },
    {
      title: 'What is inside one',
      body: 'Documents and connectors that sync them, automatically indexed into searchable chunks you can query by meaning.',
    },
    {
      title: 'How it grounds an answer',
      body: 'A search returns the most relevant chunks with similarity scores; feeding those into the model produces accurate, cited answers.',
    },
  ]}
/>

</div>

<VideoChapters
  chapters={[
    { title: 'Introduction', time: '0:00' },
    { title: 'The problem: scattered docs', time: '0:29' },
    { title: 'Too much for one prompt', time: '0:35' },
    { title: 'Enter the knowledge base', time: '0:44' },
    { title: 'In your workspace', time: '0:51' },
    { title: 'Multiple knowledge bases', time: '0:57' },
    { title: 'Answering from your docs', time: '1:05' },
    { title: 'Inside a knowledge base', time: '1:15' },
    { title: 'Chunking into passages', time: '1:24' },
    { title: 'Retrieving the closest passages', time: '1:36' },
    { title: 'Adding to the context', time: '1:47' },
    { title: 'Retrieval in the logs', time: '2:01' },
    { title: 'Grounded in your docs', time: '2:10' },
  ]}
/>

</div>

## The context problem

The naive way to give a model knowledge is to paste everything into its context. That breaks down fast — too much text, too much cost, too much noise. A knowledge base is the answer: store the corpus once, and at run time pull back only the passages that bear on the question.

Here's the shape of it — a workflow that searches a knowledge base and grounds the answer in what comes back:

<WorkflowPreview workflow={SUPPORT_KB_WORKFLOW} />

## Inside a knowledge base

A knowledge base is a resource that lives in your workspace — you can have several. Open one and it holds **documents**, plus **connectors** that bring in and keep documents in sync from outside sources.

Sim automatically **indexes and embeds** every document into searchable **chunks**, so the contents become queryable by meaning — you don't manage any of that yourself.

## Searching by meaning

Use a Knowledge block with a query and it returns the most relevant chunks, each with a **similarity score** — how closely it matches the *meaning* of the query, not its words. So "refund timelines" can match a passage that says "we process returns within 14 days," even with no shared words.

## Grounding an answer

On its own, that's retrieval. The power comes one step later: feed those chunks into an [Agent](/academy/agents/intro) block's context, and the model answers from your actual documents — accurate, up to date, and able to **cite** where each fact came from. That's grounding plus retrieval.

Knowledge bases power systems that need to give agents accurate, current context — and they're where you store what your systems learn over time.

## Related documentation

- [Knowledge Bases overview](/knowledgebase)
- [Using a knowledge base in workflows](/knowledgebase/using-in-workflows)
- [Connectors](/knowledgebase/connectors)
