Why is my article not appearing publicly?
You published an article and customers can’t find it. Five things commonly cause this — work down the list in order; most cases resolve at step 1 or 2.
1. The status isn’t published
Most common cause by far.
- Open the article in the editor.
- Check the Status dropdown in the right sidebar.
If it’s Draft, Needs Review, or Archived, the article is hidden from the public help center and from AI agents. Set it to Published. The article appears on the live site within seconds. See Article statuses for the full breakdown.
2. The article is role-tagged for a role the visitor doesn’t have
If you’ve tagged the article with a browsing role — admin, developer, anything — anonymous visitors only see articles that are role-tagless or tagged for everyone. Customer-facing articles should usually not be role-tagged at all.
- Open the article in the editor.
- Look at the role assignments.
If the article is tagged exclusively for an internal role (e.g. admin), remove that tag for public visibility. Role tags are a browsing filter, not a security boundary — they’re meant for help centers where different audiences should see different curation, not for hiding sensitive content.
3. The category isn’t visible
A category can be hidden from the public site even if its articles are published. To check:
- Open Settings → Knowledge → Sections (or the category management surface in your KB editor).
- Confirm the article’s category is published, not hidden.
A hidden category doesn’t appear in the category grid on the homepage, and articles inside it don’t appear in default listings. Search may still find them, depending on configuration.
4. Custom domain hasn’t propagated
If you’re using a custom domain, changes to articles propagate to the same content on prod.atender.dev/knowledge/<slug>. The custom-domain edge cache can be slower to update than the default URL.
- Open the article via the default URL (
prod.atender.dev/knowledge/<your-tenant-slug>/<article-slug>). Does it appear? - If yes, the article is published; the custom domain just hasn’t caught up. Wait a few minutes; the cache TTL is short.
- If still missing on the custom domain after 10 minutes, check the domain’s CDN configuration with whoever administers it.
5. Browser cache
Less common but easy to rule out.
- Open the article URL in an incognito window.
- Hard-refresh (Ctrl/Cmd+Shift+R).
If the article appears in incognito but not in your normal browser, it’s your browser’s cache. Customers won’t have this problem unless they’ve visited recently.
Still missing?
If none of the above fixed it:
- Confirm the article actually saved. Open it, scroll to the bottom, check the editor footer for the last-saved timestamp.
- Check that the URL you’re using matches the article’s slug. A slug change after publish leaves the old URL dead.
- Contact support with the article ID and the URL you’re testing. The article might be embedding-failed (the vector index update errored) — that doesn’t hide it from the public site, but it can indicate other indexing issues.