When the related articles option is enabled in the Help Center, how does Intercom calculate what’s the most relevant? We have a lot of repeating types of documents for different products, we want to make sure it’s only recommending documents for that same product currently being viewed.
Hey
When the “Related articles” option is enabled in the Help Center, Intercom uses a machine learning model to determine relevance. It looks at a combination of factors, including:
-
Article content (title, body, keywords)
-
User behavior patterns (what readers clicked next)
-
Article relationships and structure
That said, Intercom does not currently scope related articles by product or category by default. So if you have similar article titles across multiple products, the model may surface unrelated matches.
To improve relevance for product-specific content:
-
Use clear product identifiers in article titles or headings (e.g. “Resetting Password – Product A” vs. “Resetting Password – Product B”)
-
Group articles into separate collections or sections per product, which can help guide structure and behavior signals
-
Consider linking related articles manually within each article if you need stricter control
Let me know if you'd like help reviewing how your Help Center is structured happy to share best practices for scaling with multiple products!
Hi Paul, thanks for the explanation! This gave more clarity as to how the learning model works.
As a follow-up, may you confirm whether the machine learning model takes article tags into account when determining the relevance for related articles? Specifically, can it group or prioritize articles with matching tags to improve contextual relevance (e.g. surfacing only Product A-tagged articles when viewing a Product A-related article)?
We’re trying to understand if using consistent tagging across articles could help refine the model’s suggestions, especially when there are multiple different collections but with similar setups and articles. Thank you!
Reply
Join the Intercom Community 🎉
Already have an account? Login
Login to the community
No account yet? Create an account
Intercom Customers and Employees
Log in with SSOEnter your E-mail address. We'll send you an e-mail with instructions to reset your password.