Publishing an article is what takes it from a private draft to a page readers can find. There are two ways to do it, and it does a little more than go live.
Publish it
- Click the green Publish button in the editor, or
- set Status to Published in the sidebar and Save.
Both do the same thing. The confirmation message is the same as a normal save ("Content updated successfully"), so check that the Status shows Published to be sure it is live.
What publishing does
- The article goes live on your public help center and is added to your sitemap so search engines can find it.
- The AI indexes it so your help center search and, if you have AI Search, your search widget can find it. If you have AI Search, publishing also makes the article customer-facing and adds it to your Search app for you. See What content appears in AI Search results.
- After the first publish, the Publish button is gone: editing and saving a published article republishes it live right away. To take it down, set Status to Draft or Archived and Save; there is no separate Unpublish button. See Turn your help center on or off.
Settings that shape every article page
Some of what readers see on an article page is set once for the whole help center, in Settings > Article, not per article. These app-wide toggles are on by default:
- Table of Contents, which lists the headings (it appears only when an article has enough headings).
- Author and Breadcrumbs.
- User Feedback, the reader helpful-or-not control.
- Related Articles at the bottom.