Introduction

This is the reference documentation for the Zendesk Federated Search API, which is part of the Help Center API.

Federated search lets your customers see content in your help center search results that lives externally from your help center. For more information, see Setting up Zendesk Federated Search in your help center in Zendesk help.

This API gives you access to the following resources:

  • External content records
  • External content sources
  • External content types

Use the External Content Records API to ingest external content records for search. The help center search engine indexes and ranks the content. When an end user clicks an external content search result, they're taken to the URL of the external content record.

Each external content record must specify a content type and source. A source refers to the origin of the record, such as a forum, issue tracker, or learning management system. A type refers to a kind of content, such as blog posts, tech notes, or bug reports.

Use the External Content Types and External Content Sources APIs respectively to define your types and sources.

After creating content records with sources and types, the content is available in the help center search.

Run in Postman

If you use Postman, you can import the Guide External Content API endpoints as a collection into your Postman app, then try out different requests to learn how the API works. Click the following button to get started:

Run in Postman

If you don't use Postman, you can sign up for a free account on the Postman website and download the app. For more information about using Postman with Zendesk APIs, see Exploring Zendesk APIs with Postman.

Pagination

This API only supports cursor-based pagination. See Using cursor based pagination in the Help Center API docs.

Rate limits

For information on rate limits, see External Content API limits.