Plan requirement
| Subscription | Suite Team or higher, Knowledge Professional or higher |
| Access | Agent |
An article that exists and cannot be found has six causes, and permissions is the one people check last.
Why can search not find my article?
- 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 usually takes only a few minutes. If it went live moments ago, wait before investigating anything else.
5. The words do not match
The article exists and uses different vocabulary from the search. Search looks for roughly a two-thirds match between the terms searched and the article, so somebody pasting a whole sentence can find nothing while the same person searching two words finds it at once.
The fix is labels rather than a rewrite. A match in a label scores higher than a match in the body, so labelling an article with the words people type is the most direct thing you can do here. Plurals and similar variations are handled for you.
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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