Stop paying the interruption tax
Runbooks, ADRs, READMEs, and postmortems become a cited assistant in Slack and the IDE — so senior engineers stop being the search engine for the rest of the team.
Sound familiar?
Senior engineers are human search engines
"How do we run migrations in staging?" gets Slack-DMed to the same two people every week. Each interruption costs a context switch, and the answer helps exactly one person before disappearing.
Knowledge is scattered across five tools
The runbook is in Confluence, the ADR in Notion, the setup guide in a README, the real answer in a Slack thread from March. Nobody searches five tools — they just ask.
Onboarding takes a quarter
New engineers spend weeks discovering which docs exist, which are current, and who to ask. Every hire re-pays the full cost of your scattered documentation.
How BeforeQuery helps engineering teams
One assistant over all engineering knowledge
Index GitHub and GitLab repos, Confluence, Notion, Google Drive, and Slack channels into a knowledge base. Hybrid semantic + full-text search finds the runbook even when the question uses different words.
Answers in Slack, where questions happen
The Slack bot answers in-channel with citations to the exact runbook or ADR, turning one-off DM answers into shared, verifiable knowledge.
Current docs in the IDE via MCP
Expose internal engineering docs as an MCP server so AI coding tools answer from your actual conventions and infrastructure, not generic training data.
Permissions that match your org
Per-knowledge-base permissions and restricted document visibility keep incident postmortems and security runbooks scoped to the right teams, behind your SSO.
Relevant sources & integrations
Common knowledge sources and delivery channels for engineering teams.
Frequently asked questions
Does it index code or just docs?
GitHub and GitLab sources index READMEs and Markdown documentation in your repos, re-syncing via webhook on every push. Combined with Confluence, Notion, and Slack sources, the assistant covers where engineering knowledge actually lives.
Can answers stay current with our infrastructure changes?
Yes. Repo sources re-index on push via webhooks, and wiki sources like Notion and Confluence re-sync on a frequent schedule — update the runbook and the next Slack answer cites the new version.
How do we keep sensitive runbooks away from the wrong people?
Knowledge bases carry per-knowledge-base permissions, documents support restricted visibility, and the internal Ask experience sits behind your workspace auth with SAML/OIDC SSO. Audit logs record access for review.
How long does setup take?
Most teams are live the same day. Connect a source — a docs URL, GitHub repo, Notion workspace, or a file upload — and BeforeQuery crawls, normalizes, chunks, and embeds the content automatically. The website widget is a single script tag, and the Slack/Discord bots install in a few clicks.
Are answers backed by citations?
Yes. Every answer includes a structured citations list with the URL, title, and excerpt of each source used, so users can click through and verify any claim against the original document.
Is my content used to train AI models?
No. Your indexed content, embeddings, and conversations are isolated to your workspace and are only used to answer your own questions. Content is never shared across customers, and data is encrypted at rest and in transit.
Is there a free plan?
Yes. The Free plan includes 1 knowledge base, 500 indexed pages, and 100 AI questions per month — no credit card required. Pro comes with a 14-day free trial, and Enterprise plans add SSO, audit logs, and advanced governance features.
Solutions for other teams
Support Teams
Deflect repetitive questions at the widget and the support form, and give agents cited draft replies inside the helpdesk — so humans handle only the tickets that need them.
DevRel & Docs Teams
Turn your documentation, API reference, and community threads into a cited assistant that lives on your docs site, in Discord, and inside the IDE via MCP — and shows you exactly which docs to write next.
Sales Teams
Product docs, security answers, pricing rules, and battlecard knowledge in one cited assistant — in Slack, mid-deal, without waiting on a sales engineer.
Bring cited AI answers to your engineering teams
Connect your knowledge sources and see cited AI answers in minutes — free, no credit card required.
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