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 to admins — The article isn’t ready. You’re still writing or restructuring it.
• published — Visible — Indexed — Visible to everyone — The article is live. This is the steady state.
• needs-review — Hidden — Not indexed — Visible to admins, flagged — 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, and the embedding pipeline queues a vector index update so AI agents can retrieve from it. Both happen within a minute.

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• A code change touched the underlying feature and the article might be out of date.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 flag in the admin article list 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 A discontinued feature, a deprecated workflow, an article that’s been replaced by a better one.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 by changing status back to draft or published.

Transitions

• draft → published — Article goes live, embedding queued — Customers can find it; AI agents start retrieving from it.
• 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 → draft / published — Article reappears — Useful if a deprecated feature comes back.

Bulk transitions

The bulk-edit UI supports draft, published, and archived. To move articles to needs-review in bulk, you’d need to do it one at a time — or push articles via the external KB API, which accepts every status.

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. An article can be published and still be hidden from anonymous visitors if it’s role-tagged.
• Search visibility on the public site — controlled by status (only published is searchable) and the role filter on the public site.
• AI agent retrieval — controlled by status only. Roles are not retrieval signals.