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    Audience-aware links between articles — route readers to the version for their audienceSubmitted

    The problem in one line: Audience targeting and article cross-linking are both core Help Center features — but they break each other, and in the Messenger the result is that customers are pushed to a sign-in wall and end up contacting support, which is the exact opposite of what a Help Center is for.How our Help Center is set up:We plan to use audience targeting to serve different versions of the same content to different customer types. For example, we will have two articles:• "Customer Center - SIM" — shown only to our SIM audience• "Customer Center - TM" — shown to all other customersThese are separate articles with different IDs — Intercom has no way to know they're two versions of the same topic. This won't be a one-off: we plan to have other audience-split article pairs across the knowledge base, and the number will grow every time we tailor content for a new audience.The blocker we hit:In testing this setup, we found that cross-linking breaks it. A third article, shown to everyone, links to "Customer Center - TM." That single link works for most customers but is broken for the entire SIM audience — the SIM customer can't see the TM article, and there's no way to point them to the SIM version instead. We can only link to one fixed article ID.Why it's especially bad in the Messenger (where most of our customers read):• Normally, clicking an article link in the Messenger opens that article inline, right inside the conversation — smooth and in-context.• A customer who IS in the linked article's audience gets exactly that.• A customer who is NOT in that audience gets kicked OUT of the Messenger to a web page telling them they're not part of the audience and must sign in to view the article.So a customer using our Help Center exactly as intended — reading an article, clicking a relevant link — is suddenly bounced to what looks like an access-denied / login wall, for content they were never supposed to see, when a perfectly good version written specifically for them already exists. The customer did nothing wrong. The audience targeting created the problem.The consequence (this is the part that matters most):The customer's only path forward from that sign-in wall is to contact support. So audience targeting ends up generating support conversations — the precise outcome a self-service Help Center exists to prevent. Every audience-split article we link to becomes a potential support ticket for everyone outside that audience. The more we invest in tailoring content by audience, the more support volume we create. The feature works against its own purpose.This is also why we can't move forward with audience targeting the way we'd planned: adopting it more widely would mean knowingly creating these dead-ends across the knowledge base. The gap is effectively capping how much we can use a feature we want to use more.A question for Intercom: does this also affect Fin and other surfaces? If audience-restricted articles behave this way when linked, the same wall could likely appear anywhere Intercom surfaces that article — Fin citing it in an answer, suggested articles, or search results — for a user outside the audience. We haven't fully tested this, but if so, the impact is far wider than manual cross-links and would directly undercut Fin's resolution rate. Worth investigating on your side.The request: Audience-aware article links — a single link that resolves to the correct article for the reader's audience and opens inline in the Messenger like any other article link. Possible approaches:1. Article groups / variants — designate "Customer Center - SIM" and "Customer Center - TM" as audience variants of one logical article, then link to the group; Intercom serves and opens whichever variant matches the reader.2. Audience-conditional links — map a link per audience when inserting it (SIM → SIM article, everyone else → TM article).3. At absolute minimum — stop ejecting Messenger users to a sign-in wall. If a linked article isn't available to the reader, fail gracefully inside the Messenger (hide the link, or route to the parent collection) rather than throwing an access/sign-in page that dead-ends into a support contact.Why it matters: This isn't a cosmetic gap. It turns two of the Help Center's core features into a source of customer confusion and avoidable support volume — and it's currently blocking us from adopting audience targeting the way it's meant to be used. Thanks for considering!