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 or Needs Review, or the article is archived, the article is hidden from the public help center and from AI agents. Set it to Published, or use Restore on an archived article. The article is eligible for the live site immediately after the status changes, but cached public pages may need up to about 60 seconds to refresh. See Article statuses for the full breakdown.
2. The visitor is viewing a role filter that excludes the article
If you’ve tagged the article with a browsing role — admin, developer, anything — that role affects role-specific pages and role-filtered listings only. Role assignment does not make a published article private.
- Open the public help center.
- Check whether you’re viewing a selected role page or role filter.
- Clear the role filter, or switch to a role that includes the article.
If the article appears after changing the selected role filter, the article is published and public; it was just excluded from that filtered listing. 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 Knowledge, open the category’s menu and choose Edit.
- Confirm Don’t publish on public site is switched off.
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 same short edge-cache window can apply on both the default public KB URL and custom-domain public KB URLs, while authenticated preview and admin views bypass shared caching.
- Open the article via the default URL (
prod.atender.dev/knowledge/<your-tenant-slug>/<category-slug>/<article-slug>). Does it appear? - If yes, the article is published; the custom domain may just be in the same short edge-cache refresh window. Wait up to about 60 seconds and try again.
- 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 and check the Updated time shown under the title and summary.
- 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.