Knowledge Base articles have two taxonomies, and they do quite different jobs. Categories are structure; tags are routing.
Categories build the public pages
KB Categories are hierarchical, and they are what your public Knowledge Base index is made of. Each category becomes a card with an article count, and clicking it opens that category’s archive.
A few things worth knowing:
- Write a description for each one. It appears on the category’s own page and under its section heading on the index. An empty description is a missed piece of orientation, and missed search-result copy.
- A parent counts its whole branch. WordPress serves a hierarchical archive with children included, so a parent category’s page lists its children’s articles and its card counts them. That is not a miscount. An article filed under both a parent and its child counts once.
- Categories do not change retrieval. The chatbot searches across everything published. Categories organise the pages humans read; they do not scope what the chatbot can find.
Keep the tree shallow. Two levels is plenty, and a reader scanning cards gives up faster than you expect.
Tags route articles to features
KB Tags are flat, and they exist to opt an article into a specific behaviour rather than to organise anything.
Sohay creates two on activation, and they are not decorative:
| Tag | What it does |
|---|---|
policy |
Marks the article as a store-policy answer |
faq |
Marks the article as a frequently-asked-question answer |
On a WooCommerce store, the shop-policies tool uses both. When a shopper asks about shipping, returns, or refunds, the chatbot checks your WooCommerce policy pages first, then any Knowledge Base article carrying one of these tags.
The consequence is worth stating plainly: tagging an article faq makes it
eligible to be shown to a shopper asking where their parcel is. That is
excellent for “Do you ship internationally?” and unhelpful for “How to
install our WordPress plugin”. Tag on purpose.
On a site without WooCommerce, neither tag currently does anything — but tagging as though it might is the cheaper habit.
Your own tags
You can add as many tags as you like through the normal taxonomy screens.
Only policy and faq carry behaviour today; the rest are for your own
filtering and for readers browsing the site.
Uncategorised articles
An article with no category is still published, still searchable by the chatbot, and still appears on the index — in an uncategorised bucket at the bottom. Nothing breaks. It just means nobody chose where it belongs.
Where to go next
Where visitors read your Knowledge Base covers the public pages these categories build.
