Brand switching in the help center

Ref: C03 · Track: Knowledge Base Admin · Time to complete: ~2 min

Why this matters

If your Zendesk has multiple brands (separate help centers for separate product lines, regions, or acquired businesses), almost every admin action you take is scoped to the brand you're currently viewing. Edit the wrong brand and you've just broken someone else's help center.

What a brand is, in Guide terms

Each brand has: - Its own URL (e.g. help.brandA.com, help.brandB.com). - Its own theme and layout. - Its own categories, sections, and articles. - Its own end-user permissions. - Its own content blocks and labels.

Articles in Brand A's help center are invisible from Brand B's help center — unless you deliberately publish the same article to both (each copy is separate).

How to switch brands

In Guide admin:

1. Top-right of the screen, next to your avatar, there's a brand selector dropdown.
2. Click it. It lists every brand you have access to.
3. Click the brand you want.
4. The entire admin UI reloads in that brand's context — categories, articles, theme, everything.

⚠️ The brand you're in sticks until you change it. If you switch to Brand B to fix a theme, then come back tomorrow and start editing what you think is Brand A content, you're actually still in Brand B. Glance at the brand selector before every editing session.

Where the brand shows up

• Top-right dropdown (authoritative).
• The preview URL in your browser includes the brand's subdomain.
• Article lists default to showing only the current brand's articles.

If you're not sure which brand you're looking at, check all three.

Editing once, publishing to multiple brands

Not directly supported. Each article belongs to one brand. If you want the same FAQ on Brand A and Brand B, you either: - Duplicate the article (then maintain both — easy to drift). - Use a content block for shared content (see C14), then reference the block in each brand's copy of the article.

Content blocks are the better path for stable content. Direct duplication is fine for smaller, rarely-changing articles.

Gotchas

• Theme changes are per-brand. Changing the CSS on Brand A's theme doesn't touch Brand B's. Deliberate, but occasionally surprising.
• Redirects are per-brand too. A URL redirect set on help.brandA.com doesn't apply to help.brandB.com.
• Settings hierarchy. Some settings (global moderation list, require-sign-in global default) are account-wide. Most settings (theme, categories, verification cadence) are per-brand.

Quick check — have you got this?

• You're editing what you think is Brand A. A colleague says the change went to Brand B. What did you miss?
• You want the same "refund policy" article on both brands. Quickest safe way?
• Does each brand have its own theme?

Related articles

• C02 — How the knowledge base is structured
• C14 — Content blocks: reusable snippets
• C17 — Themes, versions, and Copenhagen