Article statuses

Every article in the Knowledge Base has a status. The status controls four things at once: whether the article is visible on the public site, whether AI agents retrieve from it, whether it appears in the article list by default, and which dashboards flag it.

• draft — Hidden — Not indexed — Visible — The article isn’t ready. You’re still writing or restructuring it.
• published — Visible — Indexed — Visible — The article is live. This is the steady state.
• needs-review — Hidden — Not indexed — Visible — A teammate should read this before it ships, or the article was flagged stale by the quarterly review.
• archived — Hidden — Not indexed — Hidden by default — The article is no longer accurate but you don’t want to lose the history.

When each status fits

draft

The default for new articles and AI-generated first drafts. Articles in draft are invisible to the public site and to AI agents. Use this freely — drafts cost nothing.

published

The only status that’s actually live. Moving an article to published triggers two things: it shows up on the public help center right away, and the embedding pipeline queues an asynchronous index update. AI agents and search may not retrieve the latest version until the indexing worker finishes processing the queued update.

needs-review

Use this when an article is probably fine but you want a second pair of eyes. Common cases:

• An admin published a draft AI-generated article and wants a teammate to verify the facts.
• The quarterly review pass flagged the article as stale (its lastReviewedAt is more than 90 days old).
• A code change touched the underlying feature and the article might be out of date.

Articles in needs-review behave like drafts publicly — they’re hidden from the help site and not indexed. They show a Needs review marker in the article view, and the article list’s Needs review status filter lists them so reviewers can spot them.

archived

Use this for articles that were live but no longer apply. A discontinued feature, a deprecated workflow, an article that’s been replaced by a better one. Archived articles disappear from the public site and from search. They’re preserved in the database — you can restore them with Restore from the Archived status filter, and they come back with the status they had before archiving.

Transitions

• draft → published — Article goes live immediately; embedding and search indexing are queued — Customers can view it on the public site right away. AI retrieval and public-site search may lag until the indexing worker finishes.
• published → draft — Article comes off the public site — The bulk-edit UI warns you — moving published articles back to draft hides them from customers.
• published → needs-review — Article comes off the public site — Same as draft, plus the article shows up in the review queue.
• draft → archived — Nothing visible changes — Useful for cleaning out half-written drafts you’ll never finish.
• published → archived — Article comes off the public site — Use this when the underlying feature is gone for good.
• archived → restored — Article returns with the status it had before archiving — Useful if a deprecated feature comes back.

Bulk transitions

The bulk-edit UI supports moving selected articles to draft, published, or needs-review from the Set status dropdown. To archive selected articles, use the separate destructive archive action.

What status does not control

• Translations — translation jobs are tied to a published article in your default language. Drafts don’t get translated.
• Roles — role assignments are independent of status. A role-tagged published article is still visible to every visitor; roles only narrow the public article list when a visitor picks a role.
• Search visibility on the public site — controlled by status (only published is searchable); the public site’s role filter does not apply to search.
• AI agent retrieval — controlled by status only. Roles are not retrieval signals.