--- title: "External Knowledge Base: Help Customers Help Themselves" sidebarTitle: "Introduction" description: "The External KB lets you publish customer-facing help content for every SaaS product your team supports, powering self-service and AI agents." --- > **For AI agents:** the complete documentation index is at [llms.txt](/llms.txt). Append `.md` to any page URL for its markdown version. Your External Knowledge Base is the customer-facing side of your knowledge base platform — the place where you publish polished, product-specific how-to guides that your customers can read on their own, without opening a support ticket. Whether a customer is troubleshooting an integration, configuring a workflow, or simply trying to understand what a feature does, the External KB puts the right answer in front of them immediately. ## What the External KB Is The External KB is a structured, searchable collection of help content organized around the SaaS products your team supports. Instead of burying guidance in long email threads or internal wikis that customers can never find, you publish it as a first-class help site — complete with product-scoped article collections, full-text search, and a clean reading experience your customers can bookmark and share. Each SaaS product you support gets its own content scope, so a customer looking for help with one tool isn't wading through documentation for another. You control the structure, the visibility, and the tone. The External KB is your support team's most scalable asset. ## Who It's For The External KB serves three distinct audiences, all at once. **Your end customers** get on-demand access to accurate, up-to-date guidance for the products they use. They can search by keyword, browse by product, and find step-by-step instructions without waiting for a reply from your team. **Your support team** reduces repetitive ticket volume by pointing customers to articles — or by letting the KB answer questions before a ticket is ever created. Every article you publish is a ticket that doesn't need to be written. **Your AI agents** use the External KB as their primary knowledge feed. When a customer asks your AI-powered chat assistant a question, the assistant retrieves and synthesizes answers directly from your published articles, grounding its responses in content you've reviewed and approved. ## Key Capabilities Organize all help content by SaaS product. Each product has its own article space, making it easy for customers to browse relevant guides without distraction. Choose whether a collection is openly accessible to anyone or restricted to specific customers, organizations, or authenticated users. You control the audience for every piece of content. Customers can search across all published articles instantly. Results are scoped by product and ranked by relevance, so customers find what they need in seconds. Embed your External KB directly into your product, support portal, or marketing site with a lightweight widget. Surface contextual help articles exactly where customers need them. Connect your published KB to your AI customer agent. The agent reads from your External KB to generate accurate, citation-backed answers grounded in your approved content. Track which articles get the most views, which searches return no results, and where customers drop off. Use that signal to prioritize new content and improve existing articles. ## How It Connects to the Internal KB The External KB and the Internal KB share the same platform, but they serve different audiences with different standards. Your Internal KB is where your support team keeps tribal knowledge, draft documentation, internal playbooks, and work-in-progress articles. It is never visible to customers. When an internal article is ready for customers, you promote it to the External KB. The promotion flow lets you review the content for customer-appropriateness — stripping internal jargon, adding context that external readers need, and choosing the right visibility setting — before it goes live. This one-way promotion gate ensures that customers only ever see content your team has explicitly cleared for public consumption. Promoting an article to the External KB does not delete or modify the internal version. Both copies exist independently after promotion, so your team retains its internal notes while customers see the polished output. ## Where to Go Next Follow the step-by-step setup guide to publish your first customer-facing article in minutes. Learn how to add SaaS products to your External KB and structure help content around them. Connect your External KB to an AI customer agent and let it answer questions automatically. Configure who can see your published content — from fully public to tightly permissioned.