Publish and Keep Your SaaS Product Articles Up to Date

Writing an article is only the first step. Getting it to customers — and keeping it accurate after SaaS products update their interfaces, rename features, or change workflows — is where long-term knowledge base quality is won or lost. This page walks you through the complete article lifecycle, from the moment you click Publish to the moment an article is retired, and shows you how to manage updates without ever taking content offline.

The Article Lifecycle

Every article in your External KB moves through a defined set of states. Understanding these states helps your team coordinate reviews, prioritize updates, and keep customers from landing on stale content.

Draft → In Review → Published → Needs Update → Archived

You can move an article forward or backward between states at any time. Returning a Published article to In Review does not remove it from the customer-facing directory — the currently published version stays live while revisions are in progress.

Publishing an Article

When you click Publish on an article, three things happen immediately:

1. The article becomes visible to customers — It appears in the product's topic category, in your help center's search index, and on the product's article list page. The audience it is visible to depends on the product's visibility setting (Public or Restricted).
2. It is indexed for search — The article's title, body, and tags are indexed and begin surfacing in search results. Full indexing typically completes within a few minutes of publishing.
3. It becomes available to AI agents — Any AI agent configured to draw from this product's External KB collection can retrieve and cite the article when answering customer questions. The article is included in the agent's next content sync, which runs automatically every 15 minutes.

To publish, open the article, confirm its status is In Review or Draft, and click Publish in the top-right corner. You will be asked to confirm the target audience before the article goes live.

Managing Visibility After Publishing

You can change a published article's visibility at any time without unpublishing it.

• Public → Restricted: Go to the article, open Settings → Visibility, and select Restricted. Choose which user groups or individual users should retain access. The change takes effect immediately — customers outside the permitted group see a 404 page if they navigate directly to the article URL.
• Restricted → Public: Open Settings → Visibility and select Public. The article becomes visible to all customers within seconds.
• Product-level visibility: Changing a product's visibility from Public to Restricted applies to all articles in that product simultaneously. Use this if you need to restrict an entire product collection, rather than managing individual articles one by one.

Keeping Articles Current

SaaS products change constantly. Features get renamed, UIs get redesigned, workflows get updated. A knowledge base article that was accurate six months ago can actively mislead customers today.

Set review reminders. On any published article, open Settings → Review Schedule and choose a review interval — 30, 60, or 90 days is typical for fast-moving SaaS products. When the interval expires, the article's status automatically changes to Needs Update and the product owner receives a notification to review and re-confirm accuracy.

Let customers flag outdated content. Your help center displays a "Was this article helpful?" prompt at the bottom of every published article. If a customer selects No and chooses "The information is outdated" as the reason, the article is automatically flagged as Needs Update in your dashboard and the product owner is notified. You can review all customer-flagged articles under External KB → Articles → Flagged.

Updating a Published Article

Editing a live article does not take it offline. When you open a Published article and make changes, your edits create a draft layer on top of the published version. Customers continue to see the current published version while you work on the update.

To publish your changes:

1. Open the published article and click Edit.
2. Make your changes to the draft layer. You can save drafts as many times as needed — the live article is unaffected.
3. When the update is ready, click Publish Update. Your new version replaces the old one instantly and the article remains live with zero downtime.

If you want a second set of eyes before pushing the update live, click Submit for Review instead. The draft goes to the product owner for approval, and the published version stays live until the review is complete.

Bulk Publishing and Archiving

When you have a large batch of articles to manage — for example, after a product rebrand or a major feature release — use bulk actions to save time.

1. Go to External KB → Products → [Product Name] → Articles.
2. Use the Filter panel to narrow the list by status, topic category, or last-updated date.
3. Select the checkboxes next to the articles you want to act on, or click Select All to capture all filtered results.
4. Click Bulk Actions and choose Publish, Submit for Review, or Archive.

Bulk publishing is subject to the same visibility rules as individual publishing — articles become visible to the product's configured audience immediately.

Frequently Asked Questions