Sources and the article viewer

Generative replies show their sources as the messenger does. Help Center articles open in the article viewer where your widget would open them.

Generative replies show their sources as the messenger does. Help Center articles open in the article viewer where your widget would open them.

The Sources button

A generative reply gets a Sources button once its text is complete. Click it to open a sheet over the conversation with the sources the reply cited. Each source shows a short name taken from its web address, its title and, when there is one, a description. How generative replies work in Zendesk is in Setting up generative replies.

• A Help Center article opens inside the widget, in the article viewer, when your widget would open it there.
• Any other source, and an article your widget would open in a new tab, opens in a new tab. It carries a small arrow icon to show that.

When an article opens in the widget

The preview follows the rules of the real widget. A Help Center article opens in the article viewer only when all of these apply:

• your account has the article viewer;
• the link points to your account's own Help Center address, https://yoursubdomain.zendesk.com. A Help Center on its own domain always opens in a new tab;
• the link contains a language, as in /hc/en-us/articles/;
• the article is public. The extension checks this without signing in, as the widget does.

Otherwise the article opens in a new tab. The same rules apply to links in the text of a reply and to link buttons.

The article viewer

The article viewer shows the article the way the real messenger does. It expands the widget so the article is readable, and it has three buttons in its header:

• The arrow on the left returns to the conversation.
• The expand button switches between the large and the normal widget size.
• The last button opens the article in your Help Center, in a new tab.

Under the title you see the author and how long ago the article was created or updated, and attachments are listed at the bottom. When you scroll, the title moves into the header. The extension loads the article from the Help Center of your account, with your own session.

Lists instead of a button

The messenger can also show the sources as a list under the reply: bulleted or numbered. You choose this under Cited sources in the Web Widget customisation, and the preview follows. In a list, a Help Center article also opens in the article viewer and other sources open in a new tab. See Web Widget customisation options.

Turn the article viewer off

In Preview settings, turn off Open Help Center articles inside the widget. Help Center articles then always open in a new tab, like other sources. The setting only changes the preview and is not part of the embed code. See The preview settings.

On other channels

• The previews of the Zendesk SDKs open sources in the browser, not in an article viewer. See Previewing the Zendesk SDKs for iOS and Android.
• On messaging apps, SMS and email, the sources appear the way the AI agent wrote them in its reply.

Sources in the inspector

For each generative reply, the inspector lists the cited sources under Knowledge sources on the Message tab. When a reply in the Web Widget preview links to Help Center articles, the same tab has Help Center articles: each link with Opens in the widget, or Opens in a new tab with the reason, such as the article viewer is off for this account, or the article is restricted or doesn't exist. The Log tab shows each knowledge search with the articles that were found and which of them were cited. See Reading the conversation log.

See also

• What the Web Widget preview shows
• Web Widget customisation options
• Reading the conversation log
• Setting up generative replies