Use this article to control who can view your Help Center articles — whether that's making an article private or unlisted, targeting content to specific customer segments based on login status, plan, or location, or troubleshooting cases where content appears for the wrong audience.
This allows you to protect sensitive information from your competitors, offer tailored advice and provide all your users and leads with a clean and simple Help Center experience.
You can share private articles with your users through the Messenger home, share them in the Inbox, or include them in Custom Answers or Workflows.
How to make a public article private
If an article is published in a collection, it’s visible to everyone by default. To keep an article private (i.e. not available in your public Help Center) but still shareable via a direct link, simply publish the article as unlisted.
This will generate the unique article URL which you can share with customers directly in the Inbox or hyperlink from other pages. However, it will not be searchable in your Help Center or indexed by search engines.
Tip: This is also a great way to preview an article in your Help Center without making it publicly available.
Note: It isn't possible to make the Help Centre itself private. Customers will still be able to access your Help Centre if you make all of your articles private, but they won't be able to see any articles until they log in.
How to target a public article to a specific audience
You can set up audience targeting and define exactly who should be able to view an article, by adding filters in the "Details" sidebar of the article under the Help Center Audience section.
Start by choosing if the article should be visible to Leads, Users, Visitors, or a combination of the three.
To keep an article hidden from anyone who isn’t logged in to your product, just select Users here, that’s it! 👍 Articles set to be visible to users only won’t appear in your Help Center or search results unless the user is logged in.
Click the plus sign + to define a more specific audience, then choose the attributes you’d like to filter on. As an example, if this article is only relevant to users on your ‘Pro’ plan, you could add a rule where target audience is Users and Plan is 'Pro.
Or, if this article is for admins of your workspace versus end users, you could add a rule where target audience is Users and User Type is 'Admin'.
To use audience targeting in your Help Center you must:
Have a custom domain and cookie forwarding set up. Cookie forwarding allows Intercom to identify whether someone visiting your Help Center is a logged-in user, a lead, or a visitor.
Set up custom data attributes to target different users (Optional).
Provide a login link specified in your Help Center settings under Privacy.
Article must be part of a Help Center that meets above outlined requirements.
After defining your filters, you should see a green banner at the top of the article indicating the changes you've made.
If you define a specific audience for an article:
It won’t be listed by search engines like Google.
Only people in the audience will see it when searching or browsing your Help Center - including those who search it in the Messenger.
Teammates will see a "🔒[Restricted]” warning before inserting it into messages, Custom Answers, Workflows or the Messenger.
Teammates can’t send it to people who don't match the audience filters in Inbox.
Tip for sharing internal docs with your team: You can set the audience filter to target internal teammates only.
As an example, you could set the audience filter for the Article to be:
"Email address contains @yourcompanyname" or
"Company name is ___".
Troubleshoot audience targeting issues
Use this section to diagnose and fix common problems with audience targeting in the Help Center, such as articles appearing for the wrong customers or restricted content surfacing unexpectedly.
Articles visible to incorrect audiences
In the article editor, open the Details panel and review the Help Center Audience section.
Confirm the correct customer type is selected (Users, Leads, or Visitors) and that any custom attribute filters are accurate.
If filters are missing or incorrect, update them and save. A green confirmation banner will appear at the top of the article.
Test access using an account that matches the audience rules and one that doesn't, to verify the article appears and is hidden as expected.
Help Center articles appearing despite disabled article suggestions
Go to Settings and check the Suggest help articles setting in Simple Automations.
If the setting is disabled but articles are still appearing, confirm whether the issue is tied to older open conversations — article suggestions in existing conversations may not update immediately.
Unable to view a restricted article for testing
Create a test user account that matches all required audience conditions (e.g., correct plan, user type, or geographic location).
Log in to your product using that account and navigate to the Help Center to confirm the article is visible.
Important: Audience targeting cannot be applied at the collection level — it must be set individually on each article. To update audience rules across multiple articles at once, select them in Knowledge and choose Change Help Center audience from the More dropdown in the bulk actions bar.
Advanced audience targeting
Use these techniques to set up more granular audience targeting for Help Center articles in Intercom, beyond the default Users, Leads, and Visitors options.
Create and use custom attributes for targeting
Custom attributes (also called custom data attributes, or CDAs) let you filter article visibility based on specific properties you track about your customers, such as their plan, company, or subscription status.
Go to Settings > Data > People and click + Create attribute.
Name the attribute and choose its data type (e.g., string, boolean, number).
Populate the attribute for your customers via JavaScript, CSV import, the Intercom API, or a third-party integration.
In the article editor, open the Details panel, navigate to Help Center Audience, and add a filter using the custom attribute.
Target logged-in users by segment
Navigate to Contacts and click + Add filter.
Select the user or company attribute to filter by (e.g., company name, plan, user type).
Save the segment with a clear, descriptive name.
In the article editor, apply the saved segment as an audience rule under Help Center Audience in the Details panel.
Note: Articles restricted to a specific logged-in segment won't appear in Help Center search results or be indexed by search engines like Google for customers outside that audience.
Target customers by geographic location
In the article editor, open the Details panel and navigate to Help Center Audience.
Click the plus sign + to add a filter and select Country from the attribute list.
Set the condition to match the target region (e.g., Country is United States).
Save the article. Only customers whose location matches the filter will see it in the Help Center.
FAQs
What does it look like in the Help Center?
What does it look like in the Help Center?
In Intercom's Help Center, what a customer sees when they try to access a restricted article depends on how the audience rules are configured for that article.
If the article has a more targeted audience (i.e not all logged in users) people who aren’t in the audience won’t be shown a login link, but will still have the option to search your Help Center:
Can I edit the audience targeting for a collection?
Can I edit the audience targeting for a collection?
No it's not possible to edit the audience for a collection and is not planned for the near future. You must edit the audience for each individual article. You can upvote, comment and subscribe to this feature request in our Product Wishlist.
Can I edit the audience targeting rules for articles in bulk?
Can I edit the audience targeting rules for articles in bulk?
Yes! You can now change Help Center audience roles across multiple articles at once from the Knowledge Hub list view. Select the articles you want to update, then choose Change Help Center audience from the More dropdown in the bulk actions bar. From there, you can add or remove roles (Users, Visitors, Leads) across all selected articles in one go. Roles are pre-checked when all selected articles already share the same audience roles, so you can see the current state at a glance. Note: Articles that would lose their last audience role — and any non-public articles — are safely skipped, and you'll see a notification if this happens.
Need more help? Get support from our Community Forum
Find answers and get help from Intercom Support and Community Experts