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Answering Questions

When Mention doesn't have enough in your knowledge to answer a question, that miss isn't lost. Mention collects these knowledge gaps so the people who own that area of knowledge can see where the gaps are — and close them by answering.

Every gap was actually asked by someone. Mention seeds questions of its own when an Audience is created, but it keeps only the ones it can answer and silently discards the rest — so nothing in your queue is speculative noise.

Every question is recorded once org-wide, with the asks it has drawn from each Audience. A gap is worked on its Audience's Gaps tab, with a Gaps entry in the sidebar badged with the count. An Audience owner sees the questions owed to the Audience they own; org admins see every Audience's tab, plus a Needs routing group pinned at the top holding the questions Mention could not place with any Audience. Gaps are the counterpart to contradictions: a contradiction is what your sources get wrong, a gap is what they are missing.

How questions are collected

Every ask is recorded — answered or not. When Mention answers a question, the answer is stored with it and served, citations intact, to anyone who asks it again; when it can't answer, the question stands as a gap on the Gaps tab. Each gap shows an asked N× badge and avatars for the org members who asked it, so the ones drawing repeated asks are easy to spot.

Mention groups questions that mean the same thing: when a new ask closely matches a question already on record, Mention bumps that question's counts instead of adding a duplicate. Grouping is org-wide — the same question asked in two Audiences is one record, counted across both Audiences. Answering it once closes it for everyone.

Questions asked in Slack are no exception: they count toward the audience of the channel they were asked in, or the audience the asker chose. See Slack.

Questions that Mention couldn't answer because your workspace was temporarily unavailable or out of credits are not recorded — only real asks appear here.

Questions Mention answers before anyone asks

When an Audience is created, Mention writes up to ten questions someone in that audience will need answered to do their job — grounded in your organization's topics, informed by the questions the owner gave the Audience (never restating them), and shaped by the industry you chose during setup.

That happens silently, and none of it lands in your queue. Mention attempts each question against your knowledge base: the ones it can answer are kept as ready inventory, served instantly when a member later asks; the ones it cannot are deleted. A seed never stands as an open question — everything on the Gaps tab is real demand. See Topics and Questions.

Needs routing

Most questions arrive already owned: they were asked in an Audience, so they land on that Audience's tab. When Mention cannot place a question with any Audience, it does not guess. The question sits in a Needs routing group pinned at the top of the Gaps tab, visible to org admins, who are notified. Assigning a real Audience from the question's Routed to control is the fix — the question moves onto that Audience's tab and its owners take over. The mobile app shows the same group and the same control on the Audience's Gaps screen; see Owning an Audience on Mobile.

Answering a question

Each open gap has these options:

  • Answer — Opens a panel showing the question, with a box to write the answer. When you save, Mention turns what you wrote into a fact and adds it to your organization's knowledge base, and stores your answer against the question. The gap closes for every Audience that asked, and everyone who asked it while it was open is notified that their question now has an answer.
  • Answer with… — Opens Claude Cowork or ChatGPT with a short brief for that gap (the question, audience, and the ID Mention needs to record the reply). Workshop the answer there; when you approve it, the agent writes it back through the Mention MCP (manage_unanswered_questions). This only works if Mention MCP is connected in that tool.
  • Dismiss — Sets the question aside for your Audience only. It stays open for any other Audience that asked, and it is not a delete: if someone asks the question again, it comes back. Use dismissal for questions that aren't worth your Audience's attention (typos, spam, off-topic).

Every open question also carries a Routed to control naming the Audience that owns it. Moving it hands the question to another Audience's owners — the usual move for anything in Needs routing, and available on any question an owner or org admin thinks landed in the wrong place.

Filing is not one of the options above. When the answer is recorded, Mention files the question under the topic the facts that answer cites point to, or under General when they point at no topic — so an open question only ever asks you to answer it. Where Mention filed it wrong, Filed under on the question's own page moves it, as often as you like.

Answering a question consumes credits (Mention does a small amount of writing to turn your answer into a fact) — including when the answer is written back through MCP. Dismissing is free. See Understanding Credits.

Proposals from members

Anyone can answer a gap from Slack, whether or not they own the Audience. When the person answering isn't an owner, their answer doesn't become a fact — it's held as a proposal on the question and waits for you.

A gap with a proposal shows the proposed answer and who wrote it, with two extra options:

  • Approve — records the proposal exactly as an answer of your own would be recorded: it becomes a fact, and the gap closes for every Audience that asked. Articles whose prompts rest on that knowledge are brought up to date with the words you approved.
  • Reject — discards the proposal. The gap stays open and can be proposed on again.

Only one proposal is held per question. A second person answering the same gap is told it's already with the owners. You can still use Answer to write your own answer instead — doing so replaces the proposal.

Proposals are also listed by the MCP manage_unanswered_questions tool, with approve_proposal and reject_proposal actions.

Answers stay fresh automatically

A stored answer cites the facts it was built on. When those facts change — a source is deleted, a new conflict starts hiding one, or a contradiction ruling invalidates one — Mention marks the answer stale (shown with a refreshing badge) and re-answers the question from the current knowledge shortly after. A member asking that same question again and getting nothing back marks it stale too, since it is direct evidence the answer no longer holds. Two things can happen:

  • The corpus still supports an answer — the stored answer is refreshed and the question stays closed.
  • The knowledge behind the answer is gone — the question reopens as a gap for every Audience that asked, so owners hear about it rather than members silently getting no answer.

The same works in the other direction: when someone asks an open question again after your sources have grown, Mention re-answers on the spot and closes the gap if it now can.

What answering does — and what it doesn't

Answering adds knowledge. It does not publish anything to an audience.

The fact you create joins the rest of your knowledge base, which means:

  • The next time someone asks that question — or a closely related one — Mention answers it, grounded in what you provided.
  • Articles whose prompts depend on that knowledge can now be written. If an entry in some audience's Contents was coming back not ready because nobody had written this down, answering the gap is often what unblocks it — ask Mention to write that entry again afterwards. See Curating Contents.

If you want an audience to be taught something, that is a separate, deliberate act: add an entry to that audience's Contents with a prompt covering it, or turn the question itself into a lesson. Answering a gap never pushes content to anybody by itself.

Turning a question into a lesson

An answered question that people keep asking surfaces in the FAQ beside the Chat conversation, with its ask count, and — for an owner — Turn into a lesson on its entry. Pressing it writes an article and the lesson composed from it into the contents of the audience whose FAQ you are reading, taking the question itself as the title and the recorded answer as the brief. Whether an existing lesson already covers the ground is your judgement; Mention does not judge that for you.

Promotion happens once and cannot be undone. The question stays answered, and from then on its FAQ entry links to the lesson instead of offering the button again — so anyone who finds the question is routed to the fuller version.

Filing — which topic a question sits under — is Mention's bookkeeping, settled from the facts the answer cites and correctable over MCP. Once a question has become a lesson, the pair follows it: refiling the question refiles its article and lesson under the same topic.