Announcing generative search in the help center

Announced on | Rollout starts | Rollout ends
March 26, 2025 | April 1, 2025 | May 8, 2025

We’re excited to announce the general availability of generative search in the help center. With generative search, you can enter a question or phrase in the search bar of the help center and within seconds receive a concise answer without having to click through multiple search results and scan the related articles for an answer.

Important: The GA rollout of generative search begins April 1st, 2025 and will be on by default in Guide settings. Generative search won't be visible to end users until the feature is generally available on May 5th. Beginning April 1st, if you want to opt out of this feature, you can deactivate generative search results by turning off the Quick Answers search setting in every help center in which you want to remove the feature.

This announcement includes the following topics:

What is changing?

Why is Zendesk making this change?

What do I need to do?

What is changing?

Generative search evaluates the question that a user enters in the help center search. The top matching articles, posts, and external content (on Enterprise plans where federated search is configured) are evaluated by generative AI, which then generates an answer. Generative search supports multiple languages and the answer will be in the current help center language locale.

If you have Zendesk Suite and Guide plans you will get 100,000 generative searches per month included in the plan. Only successful searches that result in the AI-generated answer are counted towards the limit. To get additional searches contact Zendesk Sales.

​​If you have a standard help center theme, generative search will be immediately available to your customers including non logged in users. If your theme is a custom based on any templating API version, you’ll need to update it to include the `{{generative_answers}}` helper on the search results page. See Using generative search to provide AI-powered answers to search queries.

Why is Zendesk making this change?

Generative search helps your customers spend as little time as possible searching for information. This drastically improves the time taken to resolve problems and results in fewer tickets.

What do I need to do?

The rollout of generative search begins April 1st. Starting from that day you will see a quick answers setting enabled in Knowledge settings. Generative search will not be functioning until the final rollout that happens May 5th-8th. Starting April 1st, if you want to opt out of the feature, you can deactivate generative search by turning off the quick answers setting in every help center in which you want to remove the feature.

Read more:

Using generative search to provide AI-powered answers to search queries

Adding generative search to your custom theme

About the standard theme and custom theme in your help center

Viewing and managing your search settings