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.
Understanding which external content sources you can connect
- 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
-
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.

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