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Answering Unanswered 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 question is recorded once org-wide, with the asks it has drawn from each Audience. A gap is worked on the Questions tab of every Audience it was asked in. Owners see their own Audiences there; org admins are owners everywhere, so they can open any Audience and work its queue. 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; when it can't, the question stands as a gap on the Questions 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, listed on both Audiences' Questions tabs with per-Audience ask counts. 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.

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.
  • 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).

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.

Answers stay fresh automatically

A stored answer cites the facts it was built on. When those facts change — a source is deleted, 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 table of 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 table of contents with a prompt covering it. Answering a gap never pushes content to anybody by itself.