Confluence is where the answer usually is — and where it's hardest to find. The runbook lives in the Engineering space, the policy in People, the decision record in Architecture, and Confluence's built-in search ranks Deploy runbook (NEW) and Deploy v1 (DEPRECATED) about the same. Cross-space search turns "where do we deploy hotfixes?" into a tab-juggling expedition.
Searching across multiple Confluence spaces with AI fixes the finding — but only if you can still trust the answer. Here's how to do it without an admin install, and with a citation on every claim.
Why cross-space Confluence search is so painful
Three things conspire against you:
- Spaces are silos. Permissions, ownership and structure differ per space, and keyword search doesn't understand which page is current.
- Staleness is invisible. A confident-looking hit might be two years old; search won't tell you.
- Server-side AI hits a permissions wall. Tools that crawl Confluence through the API need an admin to grant broad scopes, and still can't see restricted spaces or draft pages the way you can.
The approach: read from your own session, cite the page
Sidenote is a Chrome extension, so it sidesteps the admin-install and permissions problem entirely. It reads the Confluence pages you open, on the session you're already signed into — Cloud, Server or Data Center — so restricted spaces and pages behind your SSO are readable to it exactly as they are to you. Nothing is crawled server-side; a page is only read once you open it.
Step 1 — Open the pages you want to search across
As you work, open the relevant pages across each space — the runbook in Engineering, the escalation matrix in Ops, the policy in People. Each one is extracted through a dedicated wiki extractor the moment you open it with the side panel active.
Step 2 — Bundle the spaces into a Collection
This is the cross-space part. Add the pages you've opened to a Collection — pages from different spaces can live in the same Collection — and ask your question once. Sidenote answers across the whole set, not just the tab in front of you:
Across these pages, what's our current hotfix deploy process and who approves it?
Step 3 — Click the citation, land on the page
Every claim is grounded in a quoted chunk of a source page. Click a citation and Sidenote scrolls the live Confluence tab to the exact paragraph and highlights it — and the citation names which page (and space) it came from, so you know whether you're reading Engineering's runbook or a copy someone forked into a personal space.
Confluence and beyond
If your answer spans Confluence and other tools — a SharePoint file, a Google Doc, a Notion page — the same Collection can hold all of them. That broader pattern is covered in how to search across all your company docs and wikis; this guide stays focused on the multi-space Confluence case.
Why not a research tool like NotebookLM?
Upload-and-study tools like NotebookLM are great for a focused research project, but they fetch URLs on a server and can't sign in as you — so a private Confluence page behind your company login is invisible to them. Sidenote reads what your browser renders, so private spaces are in scope. The full breakdown is in Sidenote vs NotebookLM.
Throughout, your wiki content stays in your account: it's never used to train AI models and is stored in a UK region isolated per account. See security & compliance for how that works on sensitive internal docs.
The short version
- Confluence's built-in search struggles across spaces and can't tell current from stale.
- A browser extension reads the pages you open — including restricted spaces — with no admin install.
- Bundle pages from different spaces into a Collection, ask once, and click each citation back to the exact page and passage.
Frequently asked questions
Can I search across multiple Confluence spaces at once?
Yes. Open the relevant pages across each space, add them to a Collection, and ask one question — Sidenote answers across the whole set and cites which page (and space) each part of the answer came from.
Does searching Confluence with AI need an admin to install anything?
Not with Sidenote. It's a Chrome extension that reads the pages you open from your own signed-in session, so there's no Forge app to approve and no server-side crawl — and it works with Confluence Cloud, Server and Data Center.
Can it read restricted or private Confluence spaces?
Yes — the ones you can already open. Because Sidenote reads what your browser renders on your session, restricted spaces and pages behind SSO are readable exactly as they are to you. If you can't open a page, neither can Sidenote. More on this in security & compliance.