Creating Private Knowledge Base articles and categories

The instructions below are for desktops and laptops only.

You can keep certain articles in your Knowledge Base visible only to your team. Private articles are hidden from visitors and search engines, even if someone has the direct link.

Categories follow the same principle — a category will only appear publicly if it contains at least one public article.

Private articles are useful for:

• Internal standard operating procedures (SOPs)

• Agent onboarding and training materials

• Troubleshooting guides for internal use

• Drafts you want the team to review before going public

You can set an article’s visibility when creating or editing it.

Follow these steps:

2. Select the correct property.

3. Click Knowledge Base in the top menu.

4. Open an existing article or click + Create in the left panel and select Article.

5. In the left panel under Document settings, set Visibility to Private.

6. Click Publish to make it available to your team, or Save Draft if you’re not ready to publish.

Important:

• Status (Draft, Published, Archived) determines the article’s publication state. Drafts are always hidden from visitors regardless of visibility.
  
  

• Visibility (Public, Private) determines who can view it.
  
  

• Only public articles appear in search engines and in the chat widget’s Knowledge Base content. Private articles remain hidden from both.

To learn more about creating Knowledge Base articles, see this guide:

You cannot manually set a category to public or private. Category visibility depends on the articles inside it:

• If a category contains at least one public article, it will appear on your public Knowledge Base.
  
  

• If a category contains only private articles or is empty, it will not appear publicly.

This also means you can hide a category from visitors simply by making all its articles private.

To learn more, see these guides:

Creating Knowledge Base categories

How to change the order of categories in the Knowledge Base

• Keep an internal SOP private
  Set Visibility to Private and publish the article. Your team can access it via the Dashboard, but it won’t be visible to visitors or search engines.

• Hide a category from visitors
  Ensure all articles in that category are private. The category won’t appear on your public Knowledge Base.

AI Assist only uses published, public Knowledge Base articles as a data source when configured in your property’s AI Assist settings.

Private articles are never included in AI Assist responses, even if they are published.

To learn more about AI Assist’s data source, see this guide:

Understanding AI Assist’s data sources

• Each property has its own Knowledge Base and settings.
  
  

• Review team permissions regularly to ensure the right people have access to private articles.
  
  

• Consider adding “Internal –” to the title of private articles to make them easy to identify.

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