About connecting external content to Zendesk for use across knowledge experiences

You might already have internal or customer-facing content in sources outside of Zendesk. If you do, you can connect certain external content with your Zendesk account so that you can incorporate it into various workflows, including help center search results.

Connecting external content lets you leverage content you’ve already created without having to spend the time recreating it in your Zendesk help center.

This article contains the following topics:

Understanding which external content sources you can connect

Understanding where you can use external content

Using external content in workflows

Understanding which external content sources you can connect

You can connect the following external content sources to your Zendesk account:

Websites. You can configure a web crawler or an API call to index content from external web sites, such as your marketing or product website.

Confluence. You can connect one or more of your existing Confluence spaces to bring the content you’ve already created there into Zendesk.

You can connect a maximum of 50 external content sources.

Understanding where you can use external content

After you connect an external content source to your account, you can use it in the following places:

Help center search results. You can show external content results alongside your Zendesk help center articles when customers search your Zendesk help center. If generative search (sometimes called quick answers) is turned on, external content is also used to create AI-generated answers to customers’ search queries in the help center.

Knowledge in Agent Workspace. If quick answers is turned on for Agent Workspace, external content is used to create AI-generated answers to agents' queries in the context panel. To optimize your experience, configure the default search filters for the knowledge section in the context panel to include external content.

AI agent responses. Your AI agents can use external content to create AI-generated answers to questions from your customers without requiring you to script every response. External content is available for AI agents on the Essential and Advanced levels.

Using external content in workflows

To get started leveraging external content in your Zendesk workflows, perform the following steps:

Connect an external content source. Choose from one or more of the following sources:

Website (web crawler): Using a web crawler to index external web site content

Website (API call): Using an API call to index external web site content.

Confluence: Connecting Confluence to your Zendesk account as an external content source

Configure workflows to use the external content. Choose from one or more of the following workflows:

Help center search results: Including external content in your help center search results

Knowledge in Agent Workspace: Using quick answers for generative search in tickets

AI agent responses:

Essential: Connecting external content sources to an AI agent to power AI-generated answers

Advanced: Importing knowledge sources to power generative replies in advanced AI agents