Uploading documents
Add documents to your Informly library by uploading a file, pasting plain text, or crawling a URL, and follow the processing pipeline to completion.
Uploading is how most documents get into Informly. The library accepts files you already have on disk, plain text you can paste straight in, and web pages Informly fetches for you. Whichever you pick, the document moves through the same processing pipeline before the AI can answer from it.
Open the uploader from the sidebar by going to Documents → Upload, or click the create button on the library page.
Three ways to add a document
Pick the method that matches where your content lives today.
Drag a file onto the upload card, or click to open a file picker. Best for PDFs, Word documents, and .txt files you already have. See the file limits below.
Paste plain text directly into the editor and give it a title. Best for short snippets, internal notes, or content from a system Informly can't crawl. No file is created on disk — the text becomes the document.
Hand Informly a public URL and it fetches the page, extracts the main text, and ingests it. Best for help center articles, blog posts, and product pages. See Web crawl for the full flow.
File limits
| Limit | Value |
|---|---|
| Max file size | 20 MB per file |
| Supported types | .pdf, .doc, .docx, .txt |
| Files per upload | One at a time |
If you have a source larger than 20 MB, split it before uploading — see the tip near the end of this page.
Upload a file
Open the uploader
Go to Documents → Upload.
Drop the file in
Drag a PDF, Word document, or .txt file onto the drop zone, or click it to open a file picker. Informly checks the size and type before the upload starts.
Set visibility
Choose whether the document is public to the organization or private. You can change this later from the document detail page or in bulk.
Save
Click Upload. The document appears in the library with a Pending status badge.
Paste plain text
Switch to the text tab
On the upload page, switch to the Paste text tab.
Give it a title
The title is how the document appears in the library and in chat citations. Make it descriptive — "Refund policy 2026" beats "Notes".
Paste your content
Drop the text into the editor. Plain text works best; rich formatting is stripped during processing.
Save
Click Create. Processing starts immediately.
What happens after upload
Every document, regardless of source, runs through the same four-stage pipeline:
- Text extraction — Informly pulls the readable text out of the file.
- Chunking — the text is split into short passages of a few paragraphs each.
- Embedding — each chunk is converted into a vector representation.
- Indexing — the vectors are stored so the AI can retrieve them at query time.
The status badge updates in place: Pending → Processing → Completed. You can leave the page and come back — nothing is lost.
You don't need to wait on the page during processing. The badge updates live the next time you visit the library, and the document is ready to assign to a widget as soon as it hits Completed.
When processing fails
If the badge turns red, open the document detail page to see the reason. The most common causes:
| Cause | Fix |
|---|---|
| Scanned PDF with no text layer | Run the PDF through OCR first, then re-upload. |
| File over 20 MB | Split the file into smaller documents. |
| Password-protected file | Remove the password and re-upload. |
You can delete the failed document and try again, or fix the source and use Reprocess — see Managing.
Tips for cleaner ingestion
A few habits make a noticeable difference to answer quality:
- Split very large books into chapters. A 200-page manual chunks better as ten 20-page documents than one giant file.
- Strip boilerplate. Repeating headers, footers, and navigation menus eat into the chunk's useful content.
- Use descriptive titles. Titles appear in citations and help your team find documents in the library.
- Pick the right visibility up front. It's easier than fixing it in bulk later.
What's next
Documents overview
The Informly document library is the source content your AI answers from, with status tracking, visibility controls, and search across every uploaded file.
Web crawl
Turn a public URL into an Informly document by fetching the page, extracting the main text, and indexing it alongside your uploaded files.