Ask Fern is Fern’s AI Search feature, powered by Claude 4.6 Sonnet and Claude 4.5 Haiku with Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG). Ask Fern indexes your documentation and provides an interface for your end users to ask questions and get answers. Responses include citations that link directly to source pages.
Open the Fern Dashboard. Navigate to the Settings tab and click Enable on the Ask AI card.
Enabling Ask Fern triggers an automatic reindex of your content. This typically takes a few minutes, though sites with extensive custom components may take longer. Once this process is finished, the Ask Fern side panel will appear on your site.
For multi-source sites, the Dashboard also controls whether Ask Fern answers from a single sub-path’s content (hierarchical) or from all sub-paths on the domain (unified).
Ask Fern comes with built-in tools to help you understand how users interact with your documentation and ensure answers are accurate and trustworthy.
View conversations per day in the Fern Dashboard, drill down into individual conversations, and export to CSV.
The Dashboard also reports a resolution rate over the last week, month, or year — the percentage of conversations where Ask Fern returned a cited response. Conversations where the assistant can’t find relevant information count as unresolved.
Ask Fern automatically respects the role-based access control (RBAC) settings configured in your documentation. When users query Ask Fern, they only receive answers from documentation they have permission to access based on their assigned roles.
This works at all levels, from entire sections down to individual pages and conditional content within pages.