Branding and domain
How the public help centre looks, and the address visitors read it at.
Knowledge → Branding & domain (/help-centre/branding) is one page covering
two subjects: how your public help centre looks to visitors, and the address
they read it at.
Two old addresses land here
/help-centre/website and /help-centre/domain both redirect to
/help-centre/branding. Branding and Domain used to be two rows; they were
merged, and the merged page keeps the address Branding always had, so every
bookmark that predates the merge still works. The row is labelled with both
words on purpose — a consolidation may remove a row, but it may not remove a
word people navigate by.
Branding
Five fields. Anything you leave empty falls back to a neutral treatment designed to look deliberate rather than unfinished.
| Field | What it does | Empty means |
|---|---|---|
| Help centre name | Shown in the header and the browser tab. Up to 120 characters. | Your help centre's own name is used. |
| Tagline | One short line under the name on the home page. Up to 200 characters. | Nothing is shown at all. |
| Logo | A link to your logo image. | Your help centre's name is shown as text. |
| Tab icon | A link to your favicon. | A letter mark is generated in your brand colour. |
| Brand colour | A hex value such as #1a73e8. Text colours are worked out from it so they stay readable. | A neutral palette. |
Logo and tab icon are web addresses, not uploads — an https:// link, or a
path starting with /. A value that is not a web address blocks the save and
says why, rather than saving a logo that would never load. The same is true of a
brand colour that is not hex.
Running past a length cap is a warning rather than an error: the field tells you how much of it the header or the home page will actually show.
The live preview
Beside the form, What visitors see renders the top of your help centre with the settings you are typing — banner, logo or text name, tagline, and a sample link. It follows your unsaved draft, not the stored values, and it is produced by the same resolver the public site uses. The link colour is darkened from your brand colour until it is readable on white, and the preview says so.
Saving branding is an admin action. Below that floor the fields are read-only and a lock chip says Read-only: branding needs an admin.
Domain
Your help centre always keeps its platform address. A custom domain is an addition to it, never a replacement — that address is shown on this page in every state, including when the domain settings themselves cannot be read.
Claiming a domain
Enter the domain. A subdomain you control, on a domain you own — something
like help.acme.com. Press Get the DNS record.
Publish the record. You get exactly one CNAME, with its host, value and TTL, each copyable. There is no TXT record and no second step.
Press Check now. DNS is read only when you press it. Nothing re-checks in the background, and the page tells you how long ago the last check was.
What the states mean
| State | What it means |
|---|---|
| Not checked yet | The claim exists; DNS has not been read. |
| Waiting for DNS | No resolver could be reached. That is ignorance, not disproof, and it never clears a domain you have already proven. |
| Verified | A resolver answered with our value. |
| Not found | A resolver answered with something that is not us. Where a different value is published, the row says so and shows what we see. |
If a domain you already proved stops verifying, the page says so in those words and keeps the claim: a check that fails does not withdraw a domain you have already proven. Republish the record and press Check now again.
Allow time for DNS to propagate before concluding something is wrong. The page gives you no propagation advice of its own, and a check run too soon simply reads as Not found.
Adding, verifying and removing a domain is editor work; reading the settings is open to viewers.
Verified is not yet serving
Verifying proves you own the name. It does not carry traffic: this deployment does not route visitors by their own domain, and does not obtain or serve an HTTPS certificate for one. The page states this itself, under Verified, and not serving yet. Use the platform address for anything customer-facing today — including the AI ingest preconditions, which need a public address that actually answers.
Custom domains can be switched off for a deployment entirely. Where they are, the controls are absent rather than disabled, and the page says custom domains are not enabled here.
Removing a domain
Remove asks for confirmation and tells you three things: the name is released and can be claimed by anyone including another workspace; once custom domains do serve, visitors going to that address will stop reaching you; and your help centre stays at its platform address, unaffected.
The readiness band
The section's Overview page carries two cards that read this page's state back to you:
- Help Center — live only when the centre is switched on, has at least one article that is both published and public, and has a complete public address. Each blocker names itself and links to where you fix it.
- Custom domain — live only when the primary host has both a full hostname and a verification. Otherwise it offers to add one.