# Knowledge base status

**Knowledge Base Status** at the bottom of the home page shows how complete your
knowledge base is. The heading carries an overall figure — the percentage of your
knowledge base items that are approved.

It is the view to check when you want to know whether your knowledge base is
ready for the next questionnaire, and which parts of it are thin.

## Coverage by area

Coverage is broken down by the areas of the standard taxonomy — Govern, Identify,
Protect, Detect, Respond, Recover, plus Application and AI. See
[how items are categorised](/knowledge-base/categorisation/) for what each area
covers.

Each area shows how many of its items are approved out of the total, with a bar
splitting them three ways:

| Band | |
|---|---|
| Approved | Ready to be used for answering |
| Auto Answered | Answered, but not yet reviewed by a person |
| Needs Input | Still needs someone to complete it |

An area that is mostly unapproved is not yet doing any work for you — only
approved items are used to answer questionnaires and RFPs.

## Looking at a single area

Select **View Details** on an area to break it down by category. Each category
shows the same three states, so you can see exactly which part of an area is
lagging — Data Security might be well covered while Platform Security is empty.

From there you can click through into the knowledge base filtered to that
category, to see the items themselves.

**Turning a gap into coverage:** An area with few items usually means your sources don't cover that ground, or
nobody has been asked about it yet. Both are fixable:
[import a source](/sources/importing-sources/) covering the topic, or add
knowledge base items directly.

## Next steps

- [How items are categorised](/knowledge-base/categorisation/)
- [What is the knowledge base?](/knowledge-base/what-is-the-knowledge-base/)