# What AI agents can do in your help center

_Category: Search and AI_

An AI agent connected to your help center can do much of what your team does on the **Articles** and **Comments** pages and in the template editor, and read your statistics. Here is what it can do, area by area, and the permission each area needs. For every tool with its settings, see [MCP tool reference](https://developers.helpcenter.io/content/mcp-tool-reference) on the developer portal.

**Plans:** Growth and Catalyst. Staging and publishing changes also needs staged changes, a Catalyst feature.

## Permissions

Each area needs a permission that you approve when you connect, or that your API key includes.

| Permission | What it allows |
| --- | --- |
| Read your help-center categories and articles. | Finding and reading articles, categories, reader comments, staged changes and earlier versions, and listing the help centers the connection can reach. |
| Create and update your help-center articles. | Every change: articles, categories, comments, staged changes and restoring earlier versions. |
| Read your help-center analytics reports. | Your statistics. |
| Read the private notes your team leaves on drafts. | Reading team notes. |
| Reply to and resolve the private notes your team leaves on drafts. | Replying to and resolving team notes. |
| See your help center's design. | Reading the design: its theme, pages, components, custom CSS and scripts, the theme gallery and earlier published designs. |
| Change your help center's design and publish it. | Every design change, and publishing the design. |

An app you sign in to also follows your role on each help center: it can't do more there than you can in the dashboard. See [Connect Claude, ChatGPT and other AI agents](https://self.helpcenter.io/content/connect-ai-agents).

With an API key, a **Read only** key covers reading and statistics, and a **Read & write** key adds every change. Team notes need a key created with **Team notes** access, and the design needs one created with **Design** access. See [Create an API key](https://self.helpcenter.io/content/create-an-api-key).

## Help centers

List the help centers the connection can reach, with their ids. When you connected several, the agent picks one for each request, so name the help center you mean.

## Articles

- Search your articles the way a reader does: the results are published articles that anyone can read.
- List every article, drafts and private ones included, optionally from one category or by views.
- Read an article in full, including whether staged edits are waiting on it.
- Create articles in HTML or Markdown. They stay drafts unless the agent publishes them.
- Create or update up to 50 articles in one go, for imports and migrations.
- Change an article's title, text, address, category, type or visibility. On a published article, readers see the change at once.

When an agent creates or updates an article, images in its text that come from other websites are copied into your help center.

## Staged changes and versions

- See the unpublished edits waiting on an article.
- Stage an edit to a published article without readers seeing it, then publish it or throw it away. Throwing it away can't be undone.
- List an article's earlier published versions, and put one back live.

Staging needs staged changes to be turned on for your help center. See [Edit live articles safely with staged changes](https://self.helpcenter.io/content/staged-changes). Earlier versions are saved when staged changes are published or a version is restored, so an article that was never staged has none.

## Categories

- List your categories with their descriptions, parent categories and order.
- Create a category, optionally inside another one. New categories are public. To make one private, use the dashboard.
- Rename a category, change its description, icon or position, or move it under another category.
- Delete a category. If it isn't empty, the agent has to say where its articles and subcategories go. Articles are never deleted.
- Set the order of your categories, and of the articles in a category. Readers see the article order only when your category pages sort articles by Custom.

## Reader comments

- List comments across your help center, for example the ones waiting for approval, or read one article's comments with each reply under the comment it answers.
- Approve a comment, or unpublish it to take it off the article.
- Reply in the name of the person who connected the agent. The reply is published at once.

Approving, unpublishing and replying, and showing commenters' email addresses, work only when the person who connected the agent is an Owner, Admin or Editor. With a custom role, the agent can list comments but not moderate them. Agents can't delete comments: unpublishing takes a comment off the article and can be reversed.

Team notes never appear with reader comments.

## Team notes

- Read your team's private notes on an article, each tied to the passage it is about.
- Reply to a note, or mark it resolved. Replies stay internal.

Readers never see team notes. See [Leave notes for your team](https://self.helpcenter.io/content/team-notes).

## Design

- Read your help center's design: the theme's colors and fonts, each page's layout and components, custom CSS and scripts.
- Change the theme, add, move, edit or remove components, and edit custom CSS and scripts.
- Browse the theme gallery and apply a theme, in full or only the parts you name, such as its colors and fonts.
- Publish the design, throw away the unpublished changes, or load an earlier published design back into the draft.

Every design change goes to the same draft the template editor uses. Readers see nothing until the design is published, so you can review the draft in the template editor first and ask the agent to publish when you're happy. Throwing away the draft's changes can't be undone, and it removes unpublished changes your team made in the template editor too.

## Statistics

- A summary for a period: visitors, searches, article views, ratings and your team's activity, with traffic compared with the period before.
- Views and ratings for each article, sorted by views or with the worst-rated first.
- What readers searched for and didn't find: the articles you haven't written yet.

Traffic and search numbers update once a day; ratings are current. Statistics have a lower rate limit than the rest, and they are totals, never data about individual visitors.

## What agents can't do

Agents can't delete articles, upload image files, edit a reader's comment, change a category's privacy, or touch your settings, team or billing.

## Related articles

- [Connect Claude, ChatGPT and other AI agents](https://self.helpcenter.io/content/connect-ai-agents)
- [Create an API key](https://self.helpcenter.io/content/create-an-api-key)
- [MCP tool reference](https://developers.helpcenter.io/content/mcp-tool-reference) on the developer portal