Plan requirement
| Subscription | Any plan |
| Access | Agent |
An article that exists and cannot be found has six causes, and permissions is the one people check last.
Symptoms
- You can see the article and a customer cannot find it.
- Searching its exact title returns nothing.
- It used to be found and now is not.
Resolution steps
1. It is not published
A draft is invisible. Check the state before anything else.
2. Permissions
The one that produces "I can see it and they cannot". An article restricted to signed-in users does not exist for an anonymous visitor. Check who it is visible to, then try in a private window while signed out.
3. The wrong language
A reader searching in Dutch does not find an article that exists only in English. Untranslated articles are invisible in the other language.
4. It was just published
Indexing takes a short while. If it went live minutes ago, wait before investigating.
5. The words do not match
The article exists and uses different vocabulary from the search. That is not a fault; it is the article needing labels for the words people actually type.
6. It is archived
Archived articles are out of the knowledge base and not found.
The test that isolates it
Open a private window, signed out, and search. That reproduces what a customer experiences and separates permissions from everything else in ten seconds.
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