Plan requirement
| Subscription | Any plan |
| Access | Admin |
Some articles should not be feeding your AI agent, and the starting position is that all of them do. The default search rule is configured to search all articles from all imported knowledge sources, so narrowing it is something you do deliberately.
What to keep away
- Outdated articles. An AI quoting a retired procedure states it with full confidence. A human reader would notice the screenshot looks old; an AI has no such instinct.
- Internal procedures. Escalation thresholds, when to offer a refund, what to say about a competitor. An agent with access to those can repeat them to a customer.
- Anything conditional and unstated. Articles that are true for some customers and not others, without saying which. An AI applies them to everyone.
- Edge cases and exceptions. An article about a rare situation can be surfaced for a common one. Where an exception is genuinely rare, being explicit about when it applies matters more than usual.
Three ways to control it
Visibility does the first part. An AI agent for customers uses what customers can see, so internal articles are excluded by being internal. That is another reason to get visibility right rather than treating it as a filing detail.
Archiving does the second. Removing what is out of date is the action that counts, because an old article that nobody can find is still an old article the AI can quote.
Search rules do the rest. A search rule defines which knowledge sources, or which parts of them, the agent uses in a given situation. You cannot delete the default rule, but you can edit it, and you can add rules that apply when a conversation matches a segment or reaches a particular point in a procedure or dialogue.
Write the rule's description carefully. It is not only a note to yourself: Zendesk says it is there to help you remember what the rule is for and to let the AI understand its purpose. A description that says what the rule is for is doing work; one that says "test 2" is not.
What a rule can filter on
| Parameter | What it filters on |
| Article | Specific article titles. |
| Locale | Language or region. |
| Labels | Article labels. This one does not work with Confluence as a source. |
Conditions combine with Match ALL or Match ANY, and one rule can span several knowledge sources. Labels are usually the practical handle: labelling the articles you want in scope is easier to maintain than listing titles that will change.
Audit by asking
Ask your AI agent the questions you would rather it got right, and read what it says. A wrong answer points at the article behind it, and that article is either wrong, old, or should not have been in scope.
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