Help Center 2.0 (released May 11, 2021) sometimes generates and displays a list of its most-read articles — as many as six of them — over the most recent 30 days. We calculate readership metrics separately for each combination of container app, platform, and language.

When it is available, the popular articles block loads in three places:

  • The Help Center landing page for each container app
  • Inline search results before the user starts to enter any search query
  • The Contact Us page

Alternatively, when there are too few article views to cite at least three popular articles, we suppress the popular articles block entirely.

The most immediate benefit of the popular articles block is that it can expose your users to a ranked zeitgeist of what matters most, right now, to your container app’s community of users. Users view this list before they can start to execute any search strategy or begin browsing through your knowledge base. The potential outcome is that their same reason for visiting your support site has affected other users as well, and you present the answer to them immediately, the moment that they first load your site in their browser.

In its initial release, Help Center 2.0 does not support any editing of this generated list.

The popular articles block never cites any unpublished article.