HappySupport
Help center audit

The Zendesk help center, audited

As of Aug 2, 2026

We audited the Zendesk help center with a public crawl. This report covers 38,231 articles across English, Italian, Chinese, Japanese, French, and Portuguese. Every number is read from the sitemap and the pages themselves, none of it is estimated.

support.zendesk.com
Start page of the Zendesk help center, as it looked when the audit ran
75

Health score

fair

out of 100

Platform

Zendesk Guide

Articles total

38,231

Categories

278

Languages

9

Primary language: English

Domain

support.zendesk.com

Own domain

Sitemap

40,675 entries

Sitemap index

Zendesk sells customer support software, which makes its own help center a shop window: the documentation is the product category it competes in. This audit measures how well that shop window is kept.

Findability

Based on a sample of 40 article pages. The values describe that sample, not every single page.

  • 100
    Meta descriptions
    100 percent
  • 100
    Canonical tags
    100 percent
  • 0
    Exactly one H1
    0 percent
  • 21.1
    Images with alt text
    21.1 percent
  • 15
    Very short articles
    15 percent
  • 0
    Feedback control
    0 percent
  • 100
    Breadcrumbs
    100 percent
  • 7.5
    Table of contents
    7.5 percent
Words per article
348 median
Images per article
2 median
Search in the help center
missing

Health score

A weighted value across five areas. Anything we could not measure is left out rather than counted as a zero.

  • FreshnessWeight 35100
  • StructureWeight 1566
  • FindabilityWeight 2040
  • AI readinessWeight 2060
  • MultilingualWeight 1098

What we found

Every fixable problem this audit surfaced. Each row jumps to the details and the affected pages.

What stands out

Every statement names the number it came from.

Critical

1 finding

  • There is no search field on the help center's front page.

Worth fixing

7 findings

  • 57 articles have not been touched in over a year, the oldest for 1,292 days.

  • On May 1, 2026, 821 articles share the same change date, which is 17.9 percent of the library. That points at a migration rather than at real edits.

  • 100 percent of the article URLs carry a number instead of a readable title. That is the platform's doing.

  • 79 percent of the images have no alt text, which makes them invisible to screen readers and to image search.

  • The articles offer no way to give feedback, so there is no signal about which article is not working.

  • There is no llms.txt, so AI systems get no curated entry point into the documentation.

  • Only 0 percent of the sampled pages show a change date, so readers cannot tell whether a guide still applies.

Good

2 findings

  • Only 6.1 percent of the articles are older than six months. This library is being maintained.

  • All 9 AI crawlers we checked are allowed to read this help center.

Particular to this help center

Observations specific to this help center, pulled straight from the crawl data.

Oldest article

The oldest dated article is Zendesk Customer Success Program Sunshine Conversations: last updated on Jan 18, 2023, 1,292 days ago.

Broad language set

The help center publishes in 9 languages, more than most libraries in this directory attempt.

Many updates on the same day

On May 1, 2026, 821 articles were stamped with the same date, 17.9 percent of everything that carries one. That points to a migration or a bulk re-save rather than an editing pass.

Content age map

One tile per article, sorted from freshest to most outdated.

6.1%6.1 percent of the English articles are older than six months

  • Fresh under 1 month 1,437
  • Ripe 1 to 3 months 1,504
  • Turning 3 to 6 months 1,368
  • Stale 6 to 12 months 221
  • Rotten over 1 year 57

Half the library is under 54 days old. The other half stretches back 1,292 days.

One tile stands for 4 articles, so the map for all 4,587 of them fits on screen.

Changes over time

Articles changed per month over the last 24 months. Each bar counts the articles whose last change falls in that month.

4,569 articles changed over the last 24 months. The busiest month was July 2026, with 1,705 articles.

  1. September 2024: 0 articles
  2. October 2024: 0 articles
  3. November 2024: 3 articles
  4. December 2024: 0 articles
  5. January 2025: 3 articles
  6. February 2025: 0 articles
  7. March 2025: 0 articles
  8. April 2025: 9 articles
  9. May 2025: 3 articles
  10. June 2025: 15 articles
  11. July 2025: 6 articles
  12. August 2025: 19 articles
  13. September 2025: 14 articles
  14. October 2025: 22 articles
  15. November 2025: 94 articles
  16. December 2025: 17 articles
  17. January 2026: 38 articles
  18. February 2026: 83 articles
  19. March 2026: 69 articles
  20. April 2026: 406 articles
  21. May 2026: 1,239 articles
  22. June 2026: 818 articles
  23. July 2026: 1,705 articles
  24. August 2026: 6 articles

Languages

Coverage relative to the primary language. Lag measures how many days a translation trails its source.

LanguageArticlesCoverageLag
EnglishPrimary4,587100%no data
Italian4,30593.9%0 days
Chinese4,30593.9%0 days
Japanese4,25492.7%0 days
French4,24292.5%0 days
Portuguese4,23792.4%0 days
German4,21591.9%0 days
Spanish4,21591.9%0 days
Korean3,87184.4%0 days

Visibility to AI answers

Whether ChatGPT, Claude and Perplexity are allowed to read and cite this help center at all, and whether they can tell how current an article is.

Crawler access

  • GPTBotallowed
  • OAI-SearchBotallowed
  • ChatGPT-Userallowed
  • ClaudeBotallowed
  • PerplexityBotallowed
  • Google-Extendedallowed
  • Applebot-Extendedallowed
  • CCBotallowed
  • Bytespiderallowed

llms.txt

absent

Structured data

Organization, SoftwareApplication, TechArticle, WebPage, WebSite

Visible change date

on 0 percent of the sampled pages

The oldest articles

Up to 30 articles, sorted by when they last changed.

  1. /hc/en-us/articles/4408883393818-Zendesk-Customer-Success-Program-Sunshine-ConversationsJan 18, 2023/1,292 days
  2. /hc/en-us/articles/6277730757530-Fundamental-videos-for-managing-Zendesk-effectivelyMar 19, 2024/866 days
  3. /hc/en-us/articles/7215138507930-Professional-Services-release-notes-May-2024Jul 18, 2024/745 days
  4. /hc/en-us/articles/7365494448922-Professional-Services-release-notes-June-2024Jul 18, 2024/745 days
  5. /hc/en-us/articles/6828925725210-Professional-Services-release-notes-March-2024Jul 18, 2024/745 days
  6. /hc/en-us/articles/6679407695642-Professional-Services-release-notes-February-2024Jul 18, 2024/745 days
  7. /hc/en-us/articles/6334195077018-Professional-Services-release-notes-November-2023Jul 18, 2024/745 days
  8. Show all 30
    1. /hc/en-us/articles/6215823455642-Professional-Services-release-notes-September-2023Jul 18, 2024/745 days
    2. /hc/en-us/articles/6215869332250-Professional-Services-release-notes-October-2023Jul 18, 2024/745 days
    3. /hc/en-us/articles/5890323046042-Professional-Services-release-notes-July-2023Jul 18, 2024/745 days
    4. /hc/en-us/articles/5988350645018-Professional-Services-release-notes-August-2023Jul 18, 2024/745 days
    5. /hc/en-us/articles/5762267074842-Professional-Services-release-notes-June-2023Jul 18, 2024/745 days
    6. /hc/en-us/articles/5545267228186-Professional-Services-release-notes-April-2023Jul 18, 2024/745 days
    7. /hc/en-us/articles/5640503375898-Professional-Services-release-notes-May-2023Jul 18, 2024/745 days
    8. /hc/en-us/articles/5409065510170-Professional-Services-release-notes-March-2023Jul 18, 2024/745 days
    9. /hc/en-us/articles/5272760917402-Professional-Services-release-notes-January-2023Jul 18, 2024/745 days
    10. /hc/en-us/articles/5365314244762-Professional-Services-release-notes-February-2023Jul 18, 2024/745 days
    11. /hc/en-us/articles/7573284077850-Professional-Services-release-notes-August-2024Aug 13, 2024/719 days
    12. /hc/en-us/articles/4408821447194-How-to-comment-on-an-article-or-postNov 14, 2024/626 days
    13. /hc/en-us/articles/4408831684762-How-to-create-a-Zendesk-Help-Center-accountNov 14, 2024/626 days
    14. /hc/en-us/articles/8043037831962-How-can-I-update-my-Zendesk-help-center-profileNov 14, 2024/626 days
    15. /hc/en-us/articles/4408844042650-Startup-Program-What-s-IncludedJan 16, 2025/563 days
    16. /hc/en-us/articles/4409761081754-Startup-Best-Practices-Improve-Customer-CommunicationJan 16, 2025/563 days
    17. /hc/en-us/articles/4409761147802-Startup-Best-Practices-Organize-and-PrioritizeJan 16, 2025/563 days
    18. /hc/en-us/articles/4408827535770-The-ticket-title-placeholder-displays-first-comment-instead-of-the-subjectApr 11, 2025/478 days
    19. /hc/en-us/articles/7043748229914-Can-t-login-to-my-Zendesk-QA-accountApr 15, 2025/474 days
    20. /hc/en-us/articles/4417595421978-How-do-I-forward-recovered-emails-that-are-incorrectly-caught-as-spam-back-into-ZendeskApr 16, 2025/473 days
    21. /hc/en-us/articles/6995816020634-How-can-I-implement-automatic-pop-up-for-the-messaging-widget-on-my-websiteApr 16, 2025/473 days
    22. /hc/en-us/articles/4760051147546-Why-do-I-only-see-one-checkmark-for-outbound-messages-sent-with-messagingApr 16, 2025/473 days
    23. /hc/en-us/articles/4408846619546-How-do-I-remove-the-Zendesk-logoApr 17, 2025/473 days
Request your own audit

We will audit your help center, free

Drop in the URL, we crawl it and send the full report by email. Usually within two working days. Whether it gets published is your call.

  • A full age map of every article
  • Translation coverage and lag per language
  • Discoverability for search engines and AI answer engines

The public home page of your help center is enough, with or without https://. We crawl the rest from there.

We use the address for this report only. No newsletter, no reselling.

These teams document with HappySupport

How we measure

We read the help center's public sitemap, assign every URL to a language and evaluate the change date it declares. We then fetch a sample of article pages spread across the whole library and read titles, descriptions, structured data and interface controls off them. All of it runs under a clearly identifiable user agent, with pauses between requests.

Limits: change dates come from the underlying system and may have been reset in bulk during a migration. We call those days out separately. Pages that block us are left out of the sample. Nothing in this report says anything about the editorial quality of the articles.

Crawl
Crawled on Aug 2, 2026
Sample
Sample: 40 of 4,587 articles
Source
https://support.zendesk.com/hc/sitemap.xml

This report can be wrong

Everything here is measured automatically from public pages, so a report can misread a help center or miss part of it. If a number does not match what you know about your own help center, write to contact@happysupport.ai and we will check it and correct the report.

Zendesk is a trademark of its respective owner. This report was produced independently and is not affiliated with Zendesk.

Runs on Zendesk Guide

This help center is hosted on Zendesk Guide. If yours is too and the numbers above look familiar, the problem is usually not effort but tooling: articles go stale faster than anyone can rewrite them. HappySupport replaces the help center and keeps articles current automatically, with AI chat and a ticket inbox included. Your existing ticketing can stay where it is or move over.

See HappySupport as a Zendesk alternative

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