Public help center

The help center turns published knowledge base articles into a public site with navigation, search, article feedback, and its own sitemap. It is configured in Knowledge base → Help center.

Every help center has a permanent address of the form https://getmybot.dev/help/{key}, where {key} is an opaque public key generated for the bot. A custom domain such as help.example.com can be added later; the permanent address keeps working.

What is published

Article state decides everything:

  • Published — visible on the site and in its search.
  • Internal — available to the AI agent only. It never appears on the site, in search results, in the sitemap, or in page metadata.
  • Draft — never published anywhere; it is not even searchable internally.

Categories give the site its navigation. Only categories you select under Navigation categories are shown, and a category appears in that list once it contains a published article.

Requests for a missing article and requests for a private one return the same answer, so the site cannot be used to probe which internal titles exist.

Branding and languages

  • Help center name and logo (an image up to 2 MB).
  • Accent color — a plain hex value such as #2f6df6, used for links and primary actions. Arbitrary CSS is rejected.
  • Available languages and default language. A visitor can switch language; a request for a language you do not offer falls back to the default one.
  • Support chat link — the address behind the "Contact support" button. Only https:// addresses are accepted.
  • Enable public help center — the master switch. While it is off, the public routes return nothing at all.

Search and feedback

The site search covers published articles of the selected language. It runs on the server, so it also finds words that are not in the title.

Under every article a visitor answers Was this article helpful?. One visitor can vote once per article: the site sets a signed, HTTP-only cookie for that purpose, accepts the vote only from its own pages, and rate limits submissions. Votes are counted per article and feed the knowledge base analytics rather than being shown to visitors.

Search engines

Allow search engines to index this help center controls the generated robots.txt and sitemap:

  • On: robots.txt allows crawling and points to /help/{key}/sitemap.xml, which lists the index page of every enabled language and every published article, with the article's last update date.
  • Off: robots.txt disallows everything and the sitemap is empty.

The switch is read at request time and the response is never cached, so turning indexing off takes effect immediately. Internal and draft content never reaches the sitemap or the page metadata.

Custom domain

Adding a domain is a two-record DNS flow.

  1. Enter the address (for example help.example.com) under Custom domain. The hostname is normalized to its ASCII form; IP addresses, localhost, wildcards, and bare public suffixes such as example.co.uk are rejected.
  2. The dashboard shows two records that must both exist:
    • a TXT record on that hostname with the value mybot-help=<token>,
    • a CNAME record pointing the hostname at the application host.
  3. Press Check DNS. Verification requires the exact TXT value and a destination that really resolves to the application host.

The TXT value is shown once, right after the domain is added, and is kept only in that browser. If you lose it, remove the domain and add it again to receive a new value.

Domain states are Awaiting verification, Verified, Active, Verification failed, and Disabled. A failed check stores a reason:

  • The TXT value does not match the issued one — you published a different or older token.
  • The TXT record was not found in DNS — the record is missing or has not propagated yet. DNS changes can take up to 24 hours.
  • The domain does not point to the shown target — the CNAME (or the A records) resolve somewhere else.

HTTPS, routing, and disabling

A certificate is issued on demand and only for a hostname that is currently active on an enabled help center; the web server asks the API before every issuance. An unverified or disabled hostname therefore never receives a certificate.

Once a domain is active, requests to it are rewritten to that bot's help center while the path and language are preserved. A successful host lookup is cached for 30 seconds only, so disabling a domain takes effect almost immediately.

Disable switches off both the public route and certificate access while keeping the record. A disabled domain cannot be re-verified: remove it and add it again to get a new TXT value. Remove deletes it outright.

Related pages