Someone on your team once decided not to document the export limit. It was a reasonable call at the time — it only affects a handful of accounts, it's changing next quarter, and nobody wanted to draw attention to it.

That decision is invisible in the finished article. What's on the page is a clear, friendly explanation of how exports work. What's not on the page is the limit.

Your support bot cannot tell the difference between "we chose not to mention this" and "this doesn't exist".

Silence used to be safe

When only humans read your docs, leaving something out was low risk. A reader who hit the limit got an error, felt mildly annoyed, and opened a ticket. You answered it. The gap stayed invisible and cost you a few minutes.

Now the gap gets answered automatically. Asked "is there a limit on exports?", a model holding your export article finds enthusiastic description of how exports work and nothing that rules anything out. So it says no, or it says something vague that a customer will read as no.

Nobody files a ticket about that. The customer got an answer. It was wrong, and everyone involved felt fine about it.

The three silences that cost the most

Limits. Numbers, caps, quotas, file sizes, seat counts. If it's a boundary, write it down even when it feels obvious to you.

Things you can't undo. Every irreversible action needs to say so in the article, not just in the confirmation dialog. The dialog isn't in your help center, so the bot has never seen it.

What the feature is not. The sentence that starts "this doesn't…" is the single most useful line you can add to a feature article, and almost nobody writes it.

How to find yours

Take an article you're confident about. Ask any AI to read only that article and answer five questions a customer might ask, flagging anywhere it had to guess. The flags are your silences.

It's uncomfortable the first time, because the article looks fine and the list is long. That's the point — you can't see a gap by re-reading your own writing. You already know what you meant.

Write the no

You don't need a documentation project for this. You need a sentence per article, and the habit of asking "what does this not do?" before you publish.

Our free prompt for unstated assumptions does exactly this on one article in about five minutes. Start with the article you are most confident about. That is where the silences hide.