Knowledge Base MCP - User Guide

3 min read

What it does

The Knowledge Base MCP server lets an AI assistant, such as Unique AI or Claude, search and read your organisation's Unique knowledge base while you talk to it. You ask a question in plain language, the assistant searches, opens the files it needs, and answers with citations back to the source documents.

It is read-only. Nothing you or the assistant does through it changes or adds to the knowledge base.

Connecting

The first time your assistant uses the knowledge base, it asks you to sign in. Sign in with your normal company account, the same one you use for the Unique web app, and approve the connection once. Exactly how long you stay connected depends on your client, anywhere from a few hours to several days; you'll be asked to sign in again once it lapses.

If you get signed out, the assistant will say the knowledge base is unavailable and ask you to connect again.

Don't see the knowledge base as an option at all? Someone has to turn it on first: an admin adds the connector (an org admin, for Claude; whoever manages your Unique AI setup, for Unique AI), and in Unique AI it also needs to be enabled for the space you're using. Individual tools can be restricted too, but only from the Unique AI admin side; there's no equivalent for Claude yet. Ask your IT admin if it's missing.

Using Claude or Cursor instead? See Connecting Clients.

Disconnecting

Remove the connector from your client's own settings (for Unique AI, ask your tenant admin) to end the session. There's nothing left behind afterwards: kb-mcp never stored what you searched or read, so disconnecting doesn't "clean up" anything, it just ends access.

What you can see

You can only see what you could already open yourself. Your own permissions apply to every search and every file, so connecting the assistant doesn't give it, or you, access to anything new. Two colleagues asking the same question can correctly get different answers, because they don't have access to the same documents.

Your administrator may also restrict the connector to part of the knowledge base. If they have, that restriction sits on top of your own permissions. It doesn't replace them.

Getting better answers

Narrow your question to a folder when you can. "Search the Legal folder for the 2026 vendor terms" works far better than the same question with no location. Subfolders are included by default.

If you're not sure where something lives, ask what folders you can see first. That gives the assistant the layout, so its next search lands closer to what you need.

You can narrow by more than folder, too: by file type ("just the PDFs"), or by any metadata your organisation tags documents with, like a department or a status. Ask what's available to filter on if you're not sure what your documents are tagged with.

Answers come with citations. If you want to read the full document rather than the summary, just ask to see the source.

If you get nothing back

An empty result usually means one of three things: the content isn't in the knowledge base, you don't have access to it, or the search was scoped too narrowly. Ask the assistant to try again with a more permissive filter, or none at all. It will tell you if a filter was the cause.

Limits worth knowing

Large documents come back in pieces. The assistant reads a portion at a time and asks for more if it needs it, so a very long document can take several reads to get through.

A newly added file or folder can take a few minutes to show up, but only if you already asked about that folder earlier in the conversation: the listing you got back was cached before the file existed. Ask the assistant to refresh and it will re-fetch the current listing.

Very broad questions tend to work poorly. "Summarise everything about the merger" across a large knowledge base comes back weak. You'll get more out of it by narrowing to a folder or topic.

Overview: what kb-mcp is and how it fits together