Before choosing what kind of article to write, decide how the information should reach the customer.
Some support knowledge should be broadly available. It belongs in your public help center, can be found through search, and should make sense to any customer or prospect who reads it.
Other support knowledge is still customer-facing, but should not be broadly published. It may be a workaround, edge case, known limitation, unusual product behavior, or product scenario that is useful only when it applies to a customer’s situation.
That is the difference between public and private delivery.
Public content is broadly available.
Customers can find it directly. Search engines may index it. External AI systems like ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini, can retrieve it as general support knowledge.
Public content should stand on its own for any customer or prospect who reads it. It should be accurate without needing extra context from a support agent, account history, or AI system.
Public content may also be accessed outside your own help center experience. Search engines, AI tools, and other systems may index, summarize, retrieve, or reuse public pages without the full product or customer context.
That means public content needs to be safe and clear when separated from the original page, support flow, or customer situation.
Use public delivery when the information is:
- Useful to many customers
- Safe to expose broadly
- Accurate without account-specific context
- Stable enough to maintain in a public help center
- Helpful for customers or prospects to find through search
Examples of public content include:
- How to connect a payment processor
- What happens when you downgrade your plan
- Why an integration is not syncing
- Feature availability by plan
- Supported file types for uploads
Private content is selectively delivered.
It is surfaced through your own AI experience or support system only when it is relevant to the customer’s situation.
Private content is not the same as internal documentation. It is still customer-facing information. The difference is that it should be delivered in context instead of broadly exposed.
Private delivery is useful when the information is accurate, but could be misleading if it is found, indexed, or reused outside the situation where it applies.
Use private delivery when the information is:
- Useful only in a specific situation
- Accurate, but likely to confuse customers if published broadly
- Related to a workaround, edge case, or known limitation
- Relevant only to certain account states, setups, or customer scenarios
- Better delivered through an AI agent or support-assisted experience
Examples of content that may be better suited for private delivery include:
- A workaround for a legacy account issue
- A known limitation that only affects customers with a specific setup
- An unusual product behavior that is accurate, but would confuse most customers if published broadly
- A billing or account scenario that only applies in a narrow set of conditions
- A temporary issue or edge case that support teams need the AI agent to explain only when relevant
Public and private delivery both exist to help customers.
The difference is not whether the customer can benefit from the information. The difference is how broadly the information should be exposed.
Public content is designed to be found.
Private content is designed to be delivered when relevant.
Ask these questions before writing:
Should any customer or prospect be able to find this on their own?
Would this information confuse most customers without context?
Is this answer only useful for a narrow setup, account state, or scenario?
Is this a general product behavior, limit, or workflow customers should understand?
Would publishing this broadly create more questions than it answers?
Does the AI or support team need this answer available only when a situation matches?
When in doubt, ask:
Delivery only decides how the information reaches the customer.
It does not decide what kind of content you are writing.
After choosing public or private delivery, identify the job the content needs to do:
- if the customer needs to complete an action
- if the customer needs to understand something or make a decision
- if the customer needs to achieve a larger outcome
- if the customer needs to diagnose and fix a problem
- if the customer needs to look something up