How to fix the blank Ask AI response

Support Self-hosting
,
1

The Ask AI feature is generating a response title, but the actual response is blank. How can I fix this?

For example, when I searched ‘Who is the author of the most recent post?’, it responded with ‘Author of Most Recent Post’, but it actually missed its response.

I noticed this after switching the default LLM. Not sure if that’s just a coincidence.
Link: https://business.faktout.com/

image
image723×576 50.1 KB

2

Logs are showing the response correctly but the final output is not appearing in the search box

image
image671×571 51 KB

image
image996×172 16.1 KB

image
image1205×489 38 KB

image
image1186×631 53.5 KB

3

The answer is in the correct format, and should stream properly, but your ask_ai response is taking a whopping 15.5 seconds. For a site with so few topics, I don’t think this is a good experience.

Ask AI has a 20-second deadline for the whole request, including retrieval, so I suspect it is timing out after showing the title and related topics.

I’d suggest switching back to the previous model, or using a provider with more consistent response times, to see if the answer appears. That would help confirm whether the request is timing out.

4

  • I have already switched back to the previous model (gemini 2.5 flash) but the problem persists with both models.

  • I tried again. This time it took only 10 seconds but the answer didn’t appear.

  • Does it have to do anything with embeddings / semantics? Do I need to reset or clear anything? I’ve never changed the embeddings provider.

  • For some reason, AI functions always had latency on my site. I thought it was due to the cold start problem as the site stays mostly inactive (I’m yet to market it). Is there any setting I need to change?

  • If I change to a different model (grok-4-1-fast-reasoning via Azure), search always times out and even title doesn’t appear

    image
    image606×254 11 KB

    . I think some semantics issue is there. See AI log #1146

    image
    image1214×393 40.8 KB

    image
    image1182×621 49.4 KB

5

Let me show one more test:
This time the query took 3.7+0.9 seconds only still Ask AI timed out though logs show the correct response.

image
image1203×635 55.6 KB

image
image656×314 17.4 KB

image
image1025×192 16.5 KB

6

This issue is occurring only on desktop (I tried deleting cookies and using two different browsers). No problem on mobile devices.

7

A desktop-only bug feels peculiar. What browser are you using?

Can you try each of these and re-run the “ask” -

  • safe mode at /safe-mode, with themes and theme components disabled
  • full-page Ask AI versus the search dropdown. If only the dropdown fails, that narrows it to the search UI
  • if you’re familiar, try opening the browser console and see if there are any errors
    • if there are no errors, consider opening the Network tab and look for a /message-bus/…/poll result and its “Preview” tab. There should be proper streamed results there
  • are your desktop and mobile on the same Wi-Fi? use the same account and query
8

Themes are causing the issue.
I switched to the Foundation theme to test, and the response is appearing normally. When I switch back to the Mint theme, which is my default, the answer is showing up only when I scroll down a little. Follow-up questions are never appearing, even though I could see the follow-up question in the AI Logs.

I’m using Chrome. It doesn’t matter whether I use the same accounts or Wi-Fi on desktop and mobile; the outcome is the same.
And the error has nothing to do with my website latency. Now I changed to a much faster AI model.

image
image1581×718 143 KB

after scrolling down

image
image1531×579 95 KB