Article visibility and gating

Visibility in Ochre has two axes. Status (draft, published, archived) and audience (public, gated). Both matter, and they are independent. An article can be published and gated, or archived and public.

Status

Each article has one of three statuses.

Draft

Visible to your team only. Not on the public help center, not in the sitemap, not used by the AI agent, not searchable by customers. Drafts are how you write in private.

Drafts have a preview link your team can share. The link is unguessable but unauthenticated. Do not paste it into public Slack.

Published

Live everywhere. Renders at https://ochrehq.com/help/<workspace-slug>/<slug> (and at the subdomain equivalent), indexed by search engines if SEO settings allow, included in the sitemap, and used by the AI agent to draft replies.

Publishing is one click. There is no review queue.

Archived

Removed from public surfaces. Not used by AI. The article body is preserved, so you can unarchive it later. Archived articles do not appear in category lists, search, or the sitemap.

Use archived for content that is no longer accurate but you do not want to delete. For example, an article about a feature you have sunset.

You can move freely between statuses. Drafts can become published, published can be archived, archived can be republished.

Audience: public vs gated

Audience is set at the help center level, not per article. Either your whole help center is public, or it is gated.

Public help centers

Anyone with the URL can read. No sign-in. This is the default and what most teams use. Customers, prospects, search engines, and AI crawlers all see the same thing.

Gated help centers

Visitors must verify their email before reading. The flow:

1. Visitor lands on the help center.
2. They enter their email.
3. Ochre sends a magic link.
4. They click the link, get an HMAC-signed session token, and the help center unlocks.
5. The token lasts 30 days. After that, they verify again.

Gating is useful when:

• Your docs cover an enterprise tier and should not be public.
• You are in stealth or a private beta.
• You support a partner program with restricted information.

You can also restrict gated access to a domain allowlist (only @yourcustomer.com emails get a link). Set the allowlist on Knowledge → Settings.

Gated help centers are excluded from search engines. The sitemap is empty. The robots directive is forced to noindex. There is no way to "have it both ways" with public SEO and gated content. Pick one.

Switching from public to gated

You can flip the audience setting at any time. The change is immediate. Existing customers with bookmarked URLs hit the gate and need to verify.

Existing search engine results may stick around for a few weeks. Set robots to noindex and resubmit the sitemap to speed removal.

Switching from gated to public

Also immediate. The gate disappears. Articles become indexable. Submit the sitemap to Google Search Console and expect indexing within a few weeks.

Per-article gating

Ochre does not support per-article gating. The audience setting is help-center-wide. If you have one or two sensitive articles, the right move is usually to keep them as drafts and link them from a sales workflow, not from the help center itself.

Visibility and the AI agent

The AI agent only sees published articles. Specifically:

• Drafts: never used.
• Archived: never used.
• Published, public: used.
• Published, gated: used (the agent runs in your authenticated environment).

If you want to keep an article away from the agent, archive it or move it to draft. There is no separate "AI visibility" toggle. See The brain: KB graph.

Visibility and the sitemap

The sitemap includes only published, public articles whose meta robots allows indexing. Set an article to noindex and it disappears from the sitemap automatically. See Help center sitemap.

Token TTL and rotation

Gated session tokens last 30 days from issue. To force a global re-verify (for example, after a security incident), rotate the help center's signing key on Knowledge → Settings. Every existing token invalidates immediately.

Auditing visibility

The Knowledge index page filters by status. Sort by updated_at to find stale articles. Look for things that should have been archived years ago.

For analytics on what is getting read, see Article analytics.

Quick reference

• Hide while writing: Draft.
• Hide forever: Archived.
• Hide from web but show to logged-in customers: switch the help center to gated.
• Hide from search but keep on the help center: set meta robots to noindex (see Article SEO).

Related

• Article SEO
• Help center sitemap
• Knowledge base overview