How to Control Access to Knowledge Base Articles

Last updated: February 19, 2026

You can control who has access to view your knowledge base articles through visibility settings and authentication. Article visibility can be Public, Customer, or Internal. When your workspace has AI agents, a separate AI Agent Access setting controls which agents can use the article for responses.

Basic visibility settings

You can set article visibility in two ways:

  1. Bulk change visibility

    • Open your knowledge base from the sidebar (Docs), then click Articles in the left navigation.

    • Select the articles using the checkboxes.

    • In the floating bar that appears, use the visibility dropdown and choose Customer or Internal as needed.

  2. Individual article settings

    • Open the article in the editor.

    • Open the Settings sidebar (right side) and find the Visibility section.

    • Set visibility to Public, Customer, or Internal. If you choose Customer, you can optionally add account filters to restrict visibility to certain accounts. When available, use the AI Agent Access section below to control which AI agents can use the article.

AI Agent Access

If your workspace has AI agents and the granular knowledge base access feature is enabled, the article Settings sidebar includes an AI Agent Access section. Use it to control which agents can use this article when answering questions:

  • Inherit from knowledge base (or Inherit from parent collection) — Use the knowledge base’s or parent collection’s AI agent access settings.

  • Specific agents only — Only selected agents can use this article.

  • No AI agent access — AI agents cannot use this article when generating responses.

For more on configuring AI agent access for your knowledge base and collections, see 📄 Customizing AI Agent access in Knowledge Base.

Authentication options

To control who can log in to your knowledge base (and customer portal), configure authentication:

  1. Go to Settings → Workspace. On the Workspace page, find the Customer Authentication section.

  2. Choose an authentication method: Email (customers sign in with email and a one-time passcode) or SSO with JSON Web Token (JWT) (customers sign in through your organization’s login system). For more detail, see What types of login methods are supported for the customer portal and knowledge base?

Note: To restrict access to specific users, set up an authentication method in the Customer Authentication section and set article visibility to Customer or Internal. For internal-only or agent control, use Internal visibility and, when available, set AI Agent Access to limit which agents can use the article (e.g. No AI agent access).