Publishing Notes
A Help Center article is a Note that you have marked for customers and published to a site. The Note stays in your Library; the Help Center shows a snapshot of it.
Which Notes can be published
A Note is eligible when all of these are true:
External Channels is set to Public or Signed-in customers (in the Library this shows as "Everyone (public)" or "Signed-in customers"). A Note set to Not shown never publishes.
The Note is shared with your team (not a private note), is not a draft or waiting in Review, and has not been set aside in Review (rejected or archived). A Note that has left draft but has not been formally approved is fine; review approval is not required.
Its sensitivity is Standard. Confidential or higher content cannot be shown to customers.
"Who at your company" is everyone. Customer access of either kind needs company-wide availability; if company access is limited to specific people, External Channels switches back to Not shown.
The pre-publish safety review passes (see below).
Set a Note's customer access
Open the Note in the editor.
Open Sharing & classification.
Under Who at your company, keep everyone.
Under External Channels, choose Public or Signed-in customers. This also controls whether your chat widget can answer from the Note.
On the next step, check Sensitivity is Standard, and set a Category: it groups the Note in the Library and decides which Help Center collection it lands in.
Save your changes.
To change access for many Notes at once, select them in the Library and use Access & classification from the selection bar.
Publish from the editor
The editor rail has a Help Center card. It lists each of your Help Center sites with a status (live or not published). Click Publish next to a site. The card tells you if the Note cannot be published yet and why (still a draft, set aside in Review, or External Channels not set).
Once live, the card shows a link to the page and an Unpublish button.
Publish in bulk
Open Help Desk → Help Center, pick the site, and open Content.
Select articles (Shift selects a range, ⌘ or Ctrl selects individually).
Click Publish / update.
Existing live articles are updated; the safety checks still apply. When some eligible articles are not live yet, Publish all public and Publish all incl. signed-in do the whole list in one click. Each live article has an SEO button for its search title, description, and whether search engines may index it.
A page published from a Signed-in customers Note is marked as signed-in only. On a public site, anonymous visitors see the title in the list and are asked to sign in when they open it.
The safety review
Every publish is scanned before the page is stored. Confident detections block the publish and show the findings; weaker signals warn. It looks for secrets and credentials (API keys and tokens), forms that collect a password and submit to another domain, scripts that read cookies and send them elsewhere, and automatic redirects to another domain. Fix the content and publish again. See Troubleshooting.
How edits reach the live page
By default, when you edit a published Note, the live page updates automatically. The manager shows "auto-updated" with the time.
If you want a checkpoint before public changes:
Open the site's Access step.
Turn on Hold article edits for manual review.
From then on, an edit flags the page Source updated in the Content list, and the live page keeps the old version until you click Apply update. Saving the Note with Publish changes in the editor also republishes it everywhere it is live, which applies any held update.
Collections, navigation, and layout changes publish immediately.
Unpublish
Click Unpublish in the editor's Help Center card, or select pages in Content and choose Unpublish. The page stops serving on that site; the Note stays in your Library unchanged. Setting a Note's External Channels back to Not shown also takes its pages down on every site right away. Moving a Note to Trash or setting it aside in Review does not unpublish its live pages, so unpublish first.