Keep your bot's knowledge up to date

A sync is a snapshot of your content. When your content changes, your bot only knows about it after the data source syncs again. You can sync by hand, on a schedule, or whenever something happens in another system.

Who can do this: team owners and admins.

Sync by hand

1. Open your bot and go to the Data sources tab.
2. Click the three dots on the data source card, then Sync.

You can also open the data source and click Synchronise at the top of the page.

Sync on a schedule

1. Open your bot and go to the Data sources tab.
2. Click the three dots on the data source card, then Settings.
3. Open the Syncing tab.
4. Turn on Auto-syncing.
5. Choose Every day, Every week or Every month.

Each data source has its own schedule. A scheduled sync starts within an hour of being due: for example, a daily sync runs roughly 24 hours after the last one.

The Syncing tab also lists previous syncs with their date, status, storage tokens and duration. Click View to see the details of one.

Sync when you publish in your CMS

Use a Sync trigger webhook to sync a data source whenever something happens elsewhere, such as publishing an article in your CMS or finishing a deploy.

1. Open your bot and go to the Webhooks tab.
2. Click New webhook and choose Sync trigger webhook.
3. Click Choose a data source for this trigger, pick the data source, then click Create webhook.
4. On the webhook's settings page, turn the webhook on and copy the URL under Webhook URL.
5. In your CMS, add a publish webhook (sometimes called a deploy hook or outgoing webhook) that sends a request to that URL. Any HTTP method works.

Treat the URL like a password: anyone who has it can start a sync. If it leaks, click Re-generate next to Hook secret to get a new URL. Each data source can have one sync trigger webhook. See webhooks for all the settings, and for the Sync success and Sync failure webhooks that tell your other systems when a sync finishes.

You can also start a sync from an AI assistant with the sync_data_source MCP tool.

What changes when a data source re-syncs

• Only changed content is processed. Chat Thing compares each page, file or entry with the last sync. Unchanged content is skipped and uses no storage tokens, so frequent syncs of mostly unchanged content are cheap. If you change one page on a 500-page website, only that page is processed again.
• Websites: every page already in the data source is fetched again. New pages on your site are not discovered: add them with Add sitemap, Crawl or the URL options. Pages that have disappeared from your site keep their last content until you delete them from the Content tab. See website.
• Notion, YouTube playlists and RSS feeds: each sync looks again for content, so new child pages, videos and feed items are added, and content that has been removed is removed from your bot.
• Files and manual content: only change when you upload, edit or delete them in Chat Thing.

A re-sync can't start while the data source is already syncing, or if your team has used its storage token allowance for the month.

Check it works

After a sync, open the data source and check Last sync at the top of the page. On the Syncing tab, the newest sync should show a finished status.