When you’re building out your Zendesk knowledge base, one of the easiest ways to streamline retrieval for RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation) is to keep each section limited to about ten articles or fewer. 

You might think, “But I’ve got loads of articles… why would I break them down so small?” 

Here’s why: smaller section groupings create more focused relationships among content, which in turn makes your knowledge base easier to navigate, more consistent to maintain, and manageable for an AI system to parse when retrieving information. 

As you’ll see, the result is less chaos and more clarity for both your team and your AI Tools. 

Let’s use Snapchat’s Help Center as an example and walk through why their Knowledge base gets an A grade for Structured Content with Stylo Scorecard.

Snapchat has been one of my go-to examples of a great Knowledge Base for years - and part of that is due to how well they’ve structured their articles.

Snapchat has nearly 600 articles across 130 sections, which equates to roughly 5 articles per section. By keeping each section less than ten articles, they’re able to create a targeted theme or focus area. 

Think of it like organizing the shelves in a bookstore - if every shelf was crammed with a hundred random titles, it’d be impossible to find what you’re looking for quickly. But, if each shelf had a neatly curated selection of ten titles that all shared a common topic, you could easily zero in on exactly what you need without needing to wade through irrelevant material in order to find it. 

When sections are smaller, that sense of focus helps your RAG pipeline pull the right context and reduces the chance of your AI system spouting unrelated info. Instead of it needing to flatten and retrieve against your entire KB, it can focus on the right stuff, right away. 

Another benefit of smaller sections is that it sets you up nicely for relationship mapping across articles. 

Let’s say you have a “Troubleshooting” section and a “Best Practices” section, each containing ten or fewer articles. If your RAG system needs to grab details about how to solve a particular product issue, it can quickly lock onto the Troubleshooting chunk without confusion. Then, if that same question or conversation drifts into how to optimize performance, it knows to pivot to Best Practices and grab any related links that you’ve included. With fewer articles per section, these links become more meaningful and the relationships between pieces of content begin to stand out.

Of course, making this all work optimally requires intentional linking; both for your customers and for the retrieval engine. In Zendesk, you can weave in structured links (like “related articles” sections or anchor text within the body) that point to complementary topics. For example, each troubleshooting article can have a short bulleted list at the end, referencing three or four related best-practice articles. The key is to maintain consistency in how you label and link things, so that your AI or search system can identify those connections and feed them into the user’s answer. It’s all about making your knowledge base less like a loose collection of pages, and more like a network of clearly connected topics.

Ultimately, keeping each section of your Zendesk knowledge base lean - no more than about ten articles - offers a sweet spot of organization, discovery, and retrieval power. You still have plenty of room to cover the essentials, but not so many articles that everything starts to blend together. Coupled with clean, structured links between those sections, it creates a knowledge environment tailor-made for RAG pipelines to do their job efficiently. And if you ever need to add more, you can always create a new, well-defined section that your users (and your AI) will thank you for!

Want to learn how your Help Center scores against others like Snapchat? Sign up for your free Stylo Scorecard!