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Manual Sources: Links and Videos

Most content gets into Mention through an integration or a web crawl, but you can also add individual items by URL. Links let you point at a single web page; Videos let you point at a YouTube video so its transcript becomes part of your knowledge base. Both live under Sources and behave like any other asset once added.

Use manual sources when:

  • You want to include a single page or video without crawling the whole site.
  • The content is public and not reachable through any of your existing OAuth integrations.
  • You are quickly testing whether a specific resource changes Mention's answers.

A link is a single web URL that Mention fetches as readable text. It is the lightweight version of a web crawl — one page, no crawl configuration.

  1. Sign in as an admin and open Sources from the sidebar.
  2. Open the Links section.
  3. Paste the URL and confirm.

Mention fetches the page and adds it to your asset list. As with crawled pages, only activated links contribute to Glossaries, Playbooks, Articles, and SOPs.

Things to know

  • Links respect the same access rules as web crawls: pages behind a login, paywall, or robots restriction may not be ingestible.
  • Links sync on the same daily schedule as other sources, so updates to the page are picked up over time.
  • Use a web crawl instead when you want many pages from the same site — the Web crawling flow is purpose-built for that.

Videos

A video source is a YouTube URL. Mention ingests the video's transcript (when one is available) and adds it as a Video asset whose content is the transcript text. This is how you bring spoken content from public talks, recorded webinars, or product demos into your knowledge base.

Add a video

  1. Open Sources from the admin sidebar.
  2. Open the Videos section.
  3. Paste the YouTube URL and confirm.

Mention fetches the video's transcript and adds it as an asset. Activate it like any other source item.

Things to know

  • A transcript must be available for the video. YouTube auto-generated captions are usually sufficient; videos with no captions cannot be ingested.
  • The video itself is not stored — only the transcript text is used as source material.
  • For internally hosted recordings, use Google Drive (for Google Meet transcripts) or Microsoft Teams (for Teams meeting transcripts) instead.