Content Suppression

Content suppression lets you stop the bot from surfacing specific products, pages, or documents — without deleting them from your catalog or website. Suppressions survive re-crawls and re-syncs.

When to use it

• A product is discontinued or end-of-life but still lives on your website
• A page is outdated and you don't want the bot quoting it until it's updated
• A new model has replaced an old one and you want the bot to only recommend the new version
• A product is temporarily out of stock and you don't want it compared or quoted until it's back

How to suppress content

Go to Bot Settings → Suppressed Content and click + Add Suppression.

Fill in:

• Display Name — a human-readable label so you can find it later (e.g. "Legacy Widget Pro v1")
• Source Type — choose the type (Shopify Product, Website Page, Uploaded Document, etc.)
• Source ID — the unique ID the indexer uses for that item. Find it on the Knowledge Index panel by hovering any indexed item.
• Suppress Until — leave blank for permanent suppression, or pick a date for time-limited suppression (e.g. end of a clearance period)
• Reason — an internal note for your team (not shown to visitors)

How suppression works

When you suppress an item, the bot excludes it from:

• All bot answers and product recommendations
• Product comparison requests (compare_products skill)
• Quote generation (the item won't be included in quotes)

The suppression is stored separately from the index. A re-crawl or product sync will NOT undo a suppression — you have to remove it manually, or it expires automatically on the date you set.

Time-based suppression

Set a Suppress Until date when the suppression should be temporary:

• Clearance model being discontinued: suppress until inventory clears
• Seasonal product out of stock: suppress until back in stock date
• Product under revision: suppress until the updated version is live

After the expiry date, the item is automatically re-enabled on the next index sync. You don't need to do anything.

Removing a suppression

Click Remove next to any suppression to immediately re-enable that content. The item will appear in bot answers again on the next query.

How source IDs work

Each indexed item has a stable Source ID assigned when it was first indexed:

You can find source IDs on the Knowledge Index panel in your bot settings — hover any indexed item to see its source ID.

Discontinued products vs deleted products

Suppressed — item still exists in your catalog/website but the bot won't surface it. You can re-enable any time.

Deleted from source — if you delete a product from Shopify/BigCommerce, Velaro's sync-diff process removes its index entries automatically on the next full sync. No manual suppression needed.

Best practice for model upgrades: suppress the old model first, then publish the new one to the index. The bot will only recommend the new model from the moment of suppression.