An FAQ page built from the questions you answer every week

A question you answer every week is a page you haven’t written yet. Where the expense form lives, when payroll runs in December, how to reset a password, whether the school trip can be paid in two parts: each answer takes a few minutes, and on Thursday you give it again.

Start from the questions people have already sent you. An AI assistant is good at two parts of this job: noticing that “Can I roll over my days?” and “What happens to unused PTO?” are the same question, and turning a dense policy paragraph into a plain answer. It doesn’t know your answers, so here it drafts only from text you give it and marks every gap for you to fill. Your spreadsheet does the counting, because assistants miscount long lists. If you’ve sorted survey comments with Hundreds of open comments sorted into themes, you’ll recognize the split; here it’s applied to questions.

The method works for anyone who answers the same questions over and over: a support desk, HR, IT, a school office, a public counter, a nonprofit’s volunteer coordinator, a small business owner answering customers. By the end of the day you’ll have an FAQ page with your ten most-asked questions answered and published, and a saved reply that handles the next one with a sentence and a link.

What you’ll be able to do

• Publish an FAQ page today with your ten most-asked questions, each answer checked against its source and the page dated.
• Answer the next person who asks with a saved reply: one sentence and a link to the right entry.
• Rank a month or two of questions, with different wordings grouped by the assistant and counted by your spreadsheet.
• Get drafts built only from your past replies and policies, with every gap marked [CHECK] instead of filled with a guess.

What you need

• 20 to 40 questions you or your team were asked in the last four to eight weeks, by email, chat, ticket, phone or at the desk.
• The source of each real answer: your best past replies, the policy, the price list, the form.
• A spreadsheet (Excel or Google Sheets) and a chat assistant such as Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini or Copilot. A free account is enough.
• A place people already look: the help page on your website, the intranet, a shared document, a pinned post in the team chat.
• About 90 minutes, which you can split: questions and ranking in the morning, answers and publishing in the afternoon. If you don’t have that today, publish the top five and add the rest next week; the page is useful from its first entry.

To practice first, ask any assistant to invent a small gym’s house rules and 30 questions members might ask, many of them the same question in different words and a few the rules don’t cover. With real questions, copy only the question and replace names, email addresses and account numbers; Before you upload a client document covers what to check about the tool itself. And if you have fewer than 15 questions and know every answer by heart, skip the assistant and write them straight onto the page.

Steps

1. Collect the questions. In a tab called Questions, type five headers in A1 to E1: ID, Question, Where it arrived, Times, Group. In Gmail, find your past answers with searches such as from:me "you can find" newer_than:2m (sent by you, with that phrase, in the last two months); in Outlook, search Sent Items. Check the team chat and ticket system too. Add one row per question, in the asker’s words, with 1 under Times; an email with two questions gets two rows. For a question you get by phone or at the desk, add one row with your best guess of how often it came up. Number the rows in column A: type 1 and 2, select both and drag the fill handle (the small square at the corner) down.

2. Ask the assistant to group them. In a new conversation, paste prompt 1 (under “Templates to copy”) with your IDs and questions underneath. You’ll get a list of groups, each named as a question, and a table giving every ID its group. Check that the number of rows it reports matches your number of questions.

3. Bring the groups into your sheet. Paste the table into a new tab called Labels, IDs in column A and groups in column B. In E2 of the Questions tab, type =XLOOKUP(A2, Labels!A:A, Labels!B:B, "missing") and copy it down; “missing” marks a question the assistant skipped. XLOOKUP works in Google Sheets, Excel for Microsoft 365 and Excel 2021 or later; in Excel 2016 or 2019, use =IFERROR(VLOOKUP(A2, Labels!A:B, 2, FALSE), "missing").

4. Count and pick ten. In a tab called Ranking, type Group and Times in A1 and B1, then list the group names from A2 down (copy them from the assistant’s list, plus Other if the table uses it). Type =SUMIF(Questions!E:E, A2, Questions!D:D) in B2, copy it down and sort by column B, largest first. Column B should add up to the same total as the Times column in Questions; if it doesn’t, look for “missing” or a misspelled group name. Then sort the Questions tab by Group and read the questions in each top group. When one would need a different answer, give it its own group in the Labels tab and add that group to Ranking. Take the ten largest, leaving out Other. If you don’t know an answer, or two colleagues give different ones, settle it before it goes on any page and take the eleventh for now.

5. Gather the sources. For each of the ten, copy the text that holds the real answer (the policy paragraph, your clearest past reply, the link to the form) into one document, under its question.

6. Draft the answers. In a new conversation, paste prompt 2 and, under it, up to five questions, each with two or three of its original wordings and its source. Send the other five in a second message that starts “Same instructions, next five:”.

7. Check every answer against its source. Read each entry sentence by sentence and find the source words behind each one. Don’t stop at the source lines the assistant listed: a sentence it left off that list is where a typical-sounding rule slips in. Resolve each [CHECK] with the person who knows, or delete the sentence. Then ask a colleague who doesn’t usually answer these questions to read three entries and say what they’d do next. Wherever they hesitate, rewrite.

8. Publish it with a date. Follow the page layout below, most-asked question first. Give each question the Heading 2 style and add a table of contents at the top: in Google Docs, Insert, Page elements, Table of contents; in Word, References, Table of Contents (checked in October 2026). Put the page where people already look, and ask a colleague to open the link from their own account before you share it.

9. Save a reply template that points to it. Save the reply template below in your email app; Five email templates built from your sent folder shows where, in Gmail and Outlook. In the team chat, the same two lines work: the one-sentence answer and the link. The next time one of the ten questions arrives, answer with it.

Templates to copy

Prompt 1, to group the questions:

Below are questions people sent to [our support desk / HR / the school office], each with an ID. Names and personal details have been removed.

Group the questions that need the same answer, even when they're worded differently. Keep questions apart when the answers would differ, even if they share words: "Can I carry over vacation days?" and "Can I get paid for unused vacation days?" belong in two groups.

1. List the groups. For each one, give a name written as a question, in the words people use most, and one sentence on what belongs in it.
2. Then give a table with two columns, ID | Group: one row for every ID, in the same order, none skipped or merged. Use the group names exactly as listed. If a question fits no group, write Other.
3. After the table, give the number of rows.

Don't count anything else and don't answer the questions.

[paste the IDs and questions here]

Prompt 2, to draft the answers:

I'm writing an FAQ page for [who will read it, for example "the 60 people who work at our company"]. Below are up to five questions, each with the ways people actually asked it and the source text that holds the answer.

For each question, write an FAQ entry:
- Heading: the question, in the words people used.
- First sentence: the direct answer (yes or no, the date, the place, the amount).
- Then only what the reader needs to act on it: steps as a numbered list, and the link or contact if the source gives one. Under 120 words, in plain words, addressed to the reader as "you".
- Use only facts from the source text. Where a reader would need something the source doesn't say, write [CHECK: what's missing] instead of filling it in. Don't use general knowledge or what's typical elsewhere.

After each entry, under "Source lines", quote the words from the source that support each fact, copied exactly.

Question 1
How people asked it:
[two or three of the original wordings]
Source:
[the policy paragraph, your best past reply, or both]

Question 2
[same layout]

The page layout:

Common questions about [TOPIC OR SERVICE]
Last updated [MONTH DAY, YEAR] by [NAME OR TEAM]

[Table of contents: the ten questions, each linked to its answer]

[QUESTION, IN THE WORDS PEOPLE USE]   (Heading 2)
[The answer in one sentence.]
[What to do next: steps, link or contact.]

Didn't find your question? [Where to ask: an address, a form or a chat channel.]

The reply template:

Hi [FIRST NAME],

[THE ONE-SENTENCE ANSWER FROM THE FAQ ENTRY]

The details, and the steps if you need them, are on our FAQ page under "[QUESTION AS IT APPEARS ON THE PAGE]": [LINK]

If your situation is different from the one described there, reply and tell me what's different.

[SIGN-OFF]

An example entry

For example, take an HR coordinator at a made-up company of 60 people. Prompt 1 grouped “Do my leftover vacation days disappear in January?”, “Can I roll over the days I didn’t take?”, “What happens to unused PTO?” and “Can I get paid for the vacation days I didn’t use?” The last one needs a different answer, so she gave it its own group in the Labels tab. Her source was one paragraph of the made-up policy:

Employees may carry over up to five unused vacation days into the next calendar year. Carried-over days must be used by March 31; days not used by then are forfeited. Carrying over more than five days requires written approval from the employee's manager and HR.

Prompt 2 returned this entry (your assistant’s wording will differ):

Do I lose my unused vacation days at the end of the year?

You can carry up to five unused vacation days into the next year, and you need to use them by March 31. Any carried-over days you haven't used by then are lost.

If you'll have more than five days left, talk to your manager before the end of the year. Carrying over more than five needs written approval from your manager and HR.

[CHECK: where to see how many days you have left]

Source lines:
- "may carry over up to five unused vacation days into the next calendar year"
- "must be used by March 31; days not used by then are forfeited"
- "requires written approval from the employee's manager and HR"

Two edits finish it. “Before the end of the year” sounds right and appears nowhere in the policy, so she asked her manager whether the request has a deadline and wrote in the date she was given. And the [CHECK] is the first thing anyone asks next, so she added where employees can see their balance. The entry she published, with the date and the portal also made up for this example:

Do I lose my unused vacation days at the end of the year?

You can carry up to five unused vacation days into the next year, and you need to use them by March 31. Any carried-over days you haven't used by then are lost.

To carry over more than five, you need written approval from your manager and HR. Send the request by December 1.

You can see how many days you have left on the Time off page of the HR portal.

What can go wrong and how to check

Two questions in one group

Questions that share words can need different answers: a forgotten password and a locked account, a refund and an exchange, a deadline extension and a late fee. Reading the top groups in step 4 catches most of these. A sign you missed one: an answer that starts with “It depends”. Split that group and draft each half on its own.

Answers with rules nobody wrote

Where the source runs out, an assistant tends to supply what’s typical elsewhere, such as a 30-day window or a form that doesn’t exist, and writes it as smoothly as your real facts. If a fact isn’t in your source and you can’t confirm it today, cut it: a short answer still does the job.

A page nobody finds

Put the link where the questions start, which your Where it arrived column shows: the team chat’s pinned message if most came by chat, your email signature (“Answers to common questions: [link]”) if they came by email, and the welcome email for new colleagues. For the first few weeks, answer with the reply template every time; people learn where the page is from the link in your answer.

Answers that go out of date

A wrong FAQ does more harm than a missing one, because people trust it. Put a 20-minute review in your calendar every three months, and when a policy changes, update the page that day. Keep adding new questions to the Questions tab; at each review, recount, and any question that climbs into the top ten gets an entry.

Where to go next

In a month, count again in the same places over the same number of weeks and compare with your Times column. A question that keeps arriving shows you an answer people can’t find or don’t understand. To see what the page gives back, type “Minutes per reply” in C1 of the Ranking tab, fill in roughly how long a full reply to each question takes you, and put =B2*C2 in D2 and copy it down: that’s the time each question took over the weeks you collected, measured by you. Compare it with the time a reply of one sentence and a link takes you.

When an answer stays hard to follow because the policy behind it is dense, rewrite the policy in plain language, and every answer built on it gets clearer. For the questions that need a real reply every time, a one-page style card gives the assistant your voice and your facts. And if many of your “questions” are really requests for a room or a day off, a request form that fills a spreadsheet collects them in one shape and tells you when each one arrives.