Plan requirement
| Subscription | Suite Team or higher, Knowledge Professional or higher |
| Access | Agent, Admin |
No. The content of an article attachment is not included in help centre search, so a PDF is as invisible as a film to anything reading your articles. Zendesk's own recommendation is to embed the attachment's content in the article.
What does this mean for my articles?
An article whose content is a video, or a linked document, plus one line of introduction contains exactly one line as far as the AI is concerned. The same is true of search engines, and of anybody who cannot open that file at that moment.
The scale is worth stating. Attachments can be any file format and up to 20 MB each, and none of that content is readable. A 20 MB manual attached to an article adds precisely nothing to what an AI agent can answer, while the same procedure typed into the body adds all of it.
So the check is simple: read the article body on its own, with the attachment ignored. Whatever is left is what the AI has.
What should I do instead?
Write the steps as text in the body and keep the video or document alongside. Not a transcript, which reads badly, but the procedure written properly. Readers who prefer watching still watch; everybody else, including the AI agent and the search engine, gets the answer.
To find the work: look at your most-watched video articles and most-downloaded documents, and ask whether the answer exists in the text. Those are usually popular subjects, which makes them exactly the ones an AI agent should be able to answer.
Comments
0 comments
Article is closed for comments.