Integrations / Zendesk

Improve your help center search experience with Algolia. The Algolia integration quickly syncs your Zendesk Guide articles with Algolia, providing instant search results.

Before you begin

First, you need to create an Algolia account and sign in to the Algolia dashboard.

If you have multiple Algolia applications, select the one you want to use for your help center search:

The application selection menu in the Algolia dashboard showing apps for Help center, Documentation, and Sandbox. The Help center app is selected.

Install Algolia for Zendesk

  1. Go to Algolia for Zendesk.
  2. Enter the URL of your Zendesk help center.
  3. Click Connect with Zendesk.

After connecting, a new Zendesk data source is added to your Algolia dashboard. Select Data sources in the left sidebar and select the Zendesk data source. For more information, see Indexing.

The data sources page in the Algolia dashboard includes a new page that lets you configure the Zendesk integration.

After connecting Zendesk with Algolia, update your Zendesk theme to replace the default search with Algolia.

Update your theme

To replace the default search with Algolia Search, you need to update your help center theme. For more information, see Customizing your help center theme in the Zendesk documentation.

Replace the default Zendesk search with Algolia

  1. In your Zendesk Guide, on the sidebar, click Customize design.
  2. In the Themes section, select the theme you want to modify.
  3. From the list of templates, select the template document_head.hbs.
  4. Add the following code to the end of the document_head.hbs template:

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    <link
      rel="stylesheet"
      type="text/css"
      href="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/npm/algoliasearch.zendesk-hc@2.30.1/dist/algoliasearch.zendesk-hc.min.css"
    >
    <script
      type="text/javascript"
      src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/npm/algoliasearch.zendesk-hc@2.30.1/dist/algoliasearch.zendesk-hc.min.js"
    ></script>
    <script type="text/javascript">
      algoliasearchZendeskHC({
        applicationId: '<ALGOLIA-APPLICATION-ID>',
        apiKey: '<ALGOLIA-SEARCH-API-KEY>',
        subdomain: '<ZENDESK-SUBDOMAIN>'
      })
    </script>
    

Preview your changes

  1. Click Preview. For more information, see Previewing your changes in the Zendesk documentation.
  2. Enter a few letters in the search box. The autocomplete menu should show results from Algolia. If you just connected Algolia with your help center, the initial upload of your articles might take a moment.

If you want to change the look of your search, see Customize the CSS.

Next steps

After installing the Algolia for Zendesk integration and replacing the default search in your help center, you can change the configuration, you can customize the theme, or you can update the translations.

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