Adding article summaries

A published summary appears as a shaded box at the top of the article, which is what should decide how you write it.

A published summary appears as a shaded box at the top of the article, above everything else. That single fact is what should decide how you write it: the reader meets it before the article, not instead of finding the article.

Write one yourself

1. Create or edit the article.
2. Click Article components in the toolbar and select Summary.
3. Enter your summary in the Summary field.
4. Click Save.

Or generate one

1. With the Summary field open, click in it to expose the AI menu.
2. Click Generate.
3. Read it. Click Generate again if you want a different draft.
4. Edit it, then click Save.

If the AI menu does not appear, the account-wide setting is off: in Admin Center, click AI in the sidebar, then Knowledge and Article context, and check Summarize articles. It is on by default, so an absent option usually means somebody turned it off deliberately, and not that you are missing an add-on: generating a summary needs no Copilot.

Write it as the answer

Not as a description of the article. "This article explains how to reset a password" wastes the space; "You reset a password from your profile, and an admin can do it for you" answers the question.

A reader who gets what they need from the box at the top has been served, and that is a success rather than a failure of the article.

Generated summaries need editing

The generated draft is usually a description rather than an answer, because it is summarising what the article covers. Read it as somebody who wants the answer and rewrite it accordingly.

An unedited generated summary is better than none and worse than one you wrote.

Keep it short

One or two sentences. There is no documented character limit, which makes restraint your job rather than the field's: a summary that runs to a paragraph is no longer a summary, and it pushes the article itself below the fold.

Regenerate when the article changes

Nothing links the two, so an article rewritten around a new procedure keeps its old summary, sitting at the top, describing what the article used to say. Clicking Generate again is the cheapest part of updating an article.

See also

• SEO for your Help Center
• How to write an article that AI can use
• Creating content with generative AI